For the past few days I'vd been without the Internet. My ISP, BT (don't blame me, my parents chose it. And they're afraid of computers) decided that even though we had previously been paying for all you can eat evenings and weekends, we (or perhaps everyone else on the same deal) had been using too much juice. I know, people using the Internet time that they had paid for? Outrageous.

So anyway, Bastard Twats (or BT for short) have decided that 120 hours per month is all the evenings and weekends we get. Go over the limit and we then have to pay that 2p per minute crap, no matter what time it is.

I could probably live with having to pay a small amount for an hour or so on E2 each night. But the problem is, just at the point when we went over the 120 hour limit (at least, I think that's what has happened) I noticed that our BT daytime dialer (which we're supposed to use when 120 hours runs out) doesn't work. I asked my dad, and he said that it has never worked. It used to, but BT told us to download an update, and the new version doesn't work.

So, no Internet. Not even expensive Internet. And I'm only assuming we've gone over the limit - because I can't even get to my BT email, where there is no doubt a message from them saying "Please now dial in with the BT daytime dialer!". There's also probably a message from them saying "Sorry, but we've just noticed that our daytime dialer that we told you to download has a crippling bug which makes it not work. Please download a new version. Oh, no, hang on, you can't. Because you can't get to the Internet at all now, can you?"

Apparently, the rollover for the 120 hour thing is Thursday this week. I'm writing this on Tuesday, because I'm bored to hell not being able to node. Praise be to dann for the E2 Offline Scratchpad - I've been able to draft out some nodes to post when I can get back on. I really hope I can get on this week - to be honest, I'm bored as hell. My friend has just recently given me a CD with a Java SDK on, and I'd been hoping to find some tutorials on the Net and start learning to program. But of course, I can't. And while there's a Java tutorial in my History, for some reason IE hasn't got it in the Temporary Internet Files, so I can't get to it.

During my time of intense boredom, I was looking around my PC, and I found a saved page from E2 that I saved in September 2002, just after I had started noding. One of my first ever writeups was in the New Writeups list. It made me realise how absorbed I have become in this community, and how annoying it is when I can't get to it. As it stands I just hope I can get on this week, or I'll be really pissed. Although, all this is helping to convince my parents that Broadband is a very useful Internet access tool which is always on and boy could we do with some of that broadband now and A NEW PC AS WELL WOULD BE PRETTY NICE.

Oh, and also, this lack of the Internet is stopping me do any work for my GNVQ in ICT (files for which are on my school's website). But to be honest, that doesn't bother me too much right now...


UPDATE written today: Wow. I'm finally back on. Got a nice amusing email in the BT account, which basically said "You have used up all your Internet access this month. To connect to the Internet, please download the dialler from the following page..."

Good forward thinking there BT. Where would I be without you?