The Hasselhoff, The Cyberman and The Small Print

Oh yes, the small print. That stuff that you may read once, but never again. Way back in 2001, .T. and I bought a 'pooter. I then spent a few evenings dialling various dial-up ISP accounts until I settled on Vispa. They seemed a tad faster than the others and despite going down for 24 hours in the first week, it proved reliable thereafter and we happily used the email and webspace that came with the dial-up account. Years later and the tempting apple that was Pipex Broadband was waved before our eyes. It all seemed OK so we moved onto it. I won't bore you with the resulting problems that happened (well not yet anyway) but I'll say it took 3 months before the desire to strangle David Hasselhoff on sight passed by.

At the end of June I fired up the broadband, grabbed my email and replied to a few messages. Beginning of July I fired up the broadband, grabbed my email . . . . no, invalid login. Went to the online email and tried to login. Invalid password. Hmmm, could Vispa email be down? Looked at the message boards and found this.

We would like to draw our customers attention to the following paragraph in our general terms and conditions;

11.4 Vispa reserves the right to terminate all connect pioneer dialup accounts that have not been accessed via dial‐up during a 60 day period. Accounts at this point will be suspended for a further 30 days giving the customer a total grace period of 90 days to continue with the Vispa service. If no contact is made by the customer over this period, Vispa reserves the right at this point to re‐issue the username and delete any files relating to this account.

We are currently starting to disable any accounts which have not been accessed . All services will be disabled such as Mail,FTP,Dialup etc.. If you require your account re-instating, please email support@vispa.net within 30 days from this notice.

Argh! That small print. This was something I hadn't considered. By using broadband we hadn't been using the dial-up. Yes, we had used the email and FTP-ed files to websites on a frequent basis, but not the dial-up. I could see why they were doing this, they must have accumulated a lot of dead accounts over the years, all filling up with loadsaspam.

I phoned Vispa to see if I could reactivate the accounts. After waiting in the queue listening to the REALLY ANNOYING COLDPLAY EXTRACT over and over again I got through to a support person. I explained the situation, that we were still using our accounts and could they be reactivated?

"You have not used the dial-up in the last 60 days, so you will be deleted".

Is there anything that could be done I asked.

"You must use the dial-up in the next 30 days, or you will be deleted".

So if I use-the dial-up you can reactivate the account?

"Yes, otherwise you will be deleted"

By now I had an image of a cyberman with its finger hoovering over the DELETE BOOLBAR button. Can anything be done to make these accounts more permanent without the treat of being deleted? The cyberman suddenly spurted out a load of techno-speak in which I thought I heard the words "open", "domain", "move". So could I buy a domain from Vispa and mirror the existing websites to it, (thus saving the high position of the existing URL in various search engines?)

"No, the accounts will be deleted. All your files will be DELETED!"

"Gah", said I.

"Delete! Delete! Delete!" said the cyberman raising its evil weapon . . .

Well, not quite. We dashed around to the in-laws to use their antique dial-up to save the accounts. .T.'s still worked, but mine was well out of action. The following day I noted that .T.'s account was now frozen, even though we had dialled up the night before! Another call to the cyberman was needed.

This time I was straight to number one in the queue. One hour later I was still number one in the queue although by now I had emailed a complaint to Vispa and decided I would strangle Chris Martin on sight. I used a second phone just to see if I would end up as number two on the queue only to go straight through to a human.

"err, I've been in your queue for an hour on another phone"

"Have you, I haven't had a call for an hour, oh, hang on a minute, we had to swop our phone exchange an hour ago, I bet you ended up stuck on the old system"

Arghhhhhhh!

However this guy was full of apologies and sounded HUMAN! I told him my dilemma and he agreed it was a bit draconian and some advanced warning should have been issued and would reactivate our accounts straight away, even if it meant he would get into trouble. Email now sorted. Nice chap on support (and if I had phoned a couple of minutes later there would have been no wait, which has always been my experience with Vispa up until that cyberman call).

So always read the small print and remember it off by heart. You never know when you might need to know it 6 years later.