Today I finally admitted defeat and put myself on the larger and (gasp) 80 bucks/month broadband plan. I phone TelstraClear, announce that I would like to give them more money, they smile sweetly and tell me it should be a goer by the end of the day.

Half an hour later the net goes down and stays down. I phone support and get put on hold for AN HOUR after which they fail to debug the problem for another ten minutes or so, including the following conversation:

Them: "OK, can you press the start button"
Me: "What?"
Them: "Can you press the start button"
Me: "I'm on a Mac"
[silence]
Me: "What is it you're trying to achieve?"

They wanted to know that I'd set my IP up correctly. Because, y'know, that always magically changes underneath you on a tuesday morning. Finally, as they guy is staring at the screen blankly I jokingly ask if this is what happens every time someone pays for an upgrade. He says "Oh! You've changed plans? That'll be it, then". I kid you not. An email is sent to the back end team, presumably saying "you've broken it again, customer number 123456" and they promise to have it fixed within an hour.

Now, I've taken to not taking local copies of the Internet, preferring instead to just shortcut, say, the Python library reference and so this basically boils down to two hours out of my day. I ask to be connected to customer care so I might have a minor bitch to them and try to get let off my over charges for last month as a sort of "yeah, sorry mate" thing because some companies like to go the extra mile to please customers, particularly huge enormous 10yr+ broadband consumers (I had a bank call me to reverse a charge once). But not TelstraClear who consider themselves above this sort of thing. Right. Fine. Gotta ask though, eh?

All I can say at this point is that a very shiny new box, probably owned by Telecom has appeared halfway down the street and if they want to make me an offer involving VDSL then TelstraClear have just opened my grand-a-year wallet significantly. Dipshits.