As recounted here in a previous thrilling instalment, we’ve moved away from Pipex but were left mildly puzzled by our old Pipex email addresses still working. Well, we rang up their cancellations department again (word to the wise; their cancellations department seems to be UK based which made a nice change) and was assured that our account with them was as dead as the proverbial parrot.

Fast forward a week or so and we receive the usual monthly email from Pipex informing us that this month’s bill was about to be debited from our bank account. Were we surprised? No. Annoyed? Yes. So another phone call to their cancellations department ensued and us finding out that our status was now ‘cancellation pending’. Hmm.

Their advice was to ring their billing department which in a grand old show of joined up thinking seemed to be in India and lo! they had absolutely no record of us cancelling. Luckily the chap we spoke to was actually on the ball and put our account on hold so that we wouldn’t be chased for any payments.

Within the last few days our old email addresses have finally stopped working which we’re taking to be a sign of things actually happening as they should have done in the first place. I assume if we hadn’t followed this up we would have been receiving angry red letters from them for an account that was supposedly dead.

Good old Pipex!

The move from Pipex to Zen Internet seems to have gone without a hitch.

A bit nerve wracking when building up to the move as we’re rather dependent on our broadband connection but in the event it was very smooth. Pipex claim that our account with them has been cancelled but seeing as our old Pipex email addresses seem to be still working I’m not sure I believe them. I fully expect to get angry letters from them in a couple of months time complaining that we’re behind on payments in true corporate left-hand-not-knowing-what-the-right-hand-is-doing. Of course, I really don’t want to be giving sod’s law any temptation really do I?

Impressed with Zen Internet so far especially as soon as we made the switch our router started reporting that our connection had gone from just over 2Mb (although Pipex claimed our line was capable of up to 6Mb) to a touch over 8Mb! Not bad.

After a fair few years with the same ISP we’re finally moving.

We’ve probably been with Pipex for something daft like five years and while over all the connectivity has been pretty good, we’ve seen their customer support gradually dwindle away into being rather laughable. Right now, it feels like walking a tight rope; yes the connection is good but we’re constantly in fear of having another problem because Pipex’s customer support is woeful. (Apologies to anyone at Pipex who feels they do a sterling job, we just haven’t had the good fortune to be put through to you.)

Oh, and they’re now owned by Tiscali; a company that we moved away from many years ago. It’s like we’re being followed!

So, we’re pinning our hopes on Zen Internet who have been recommended to us. Fingers crossed!

Somebody has been very very silly: Bank customer data sold on eBay. I know publicity is supposed to be beneficial whether it’s good or bad but who’s going to trust their data to that archiving firm now?

I’m beginning to think that several pieces of our hardware are haunted. Either that or I have solid gold evidence that our hardware is developing its own artificial intelligence.
As evidence I’d like to produce the following examples as proof:

1. My trusty old mouse started registering a click as two clicks, a double click as three clicks …. I dread to think what three clicks would have registered as.

2. A few weeks ago our internet connection seemingly decided to throw a wobbly. Although we could access the internet in general, any of our own websites hosted on a particular (normally very reliable) hosting account was painfully slow. After shouting at our hosts and ISP (getting sense out of the ISP was an exercise in futility if ever there was one) we swapped routers around and back again as a last resort and lo, everything was lovely again. No idea what was going on there except that it was a possible comment on our websites by our router.

3. My PC started to go into hibernation of its own accord - even while I was using it. After wracking my brains for possible causes and beginning to face the dismal prospect of trying to fathom out which part of the innards of the PC was causing the problem, I swapped keyboards and again lo, everything was lovely. Clearly my keyboard was boring my PC to death.