Stolen Weeks

You may wonder why I've been quiet. Of course, there's a reason. I believe I've just had around $110 stolen from me by Telstra, over someone else's telephone bill, and it means my connection will still be down until sometime Wednesday 28 March.

So here is a question for you: You live in a house with a friend, and that friend defaults on their car payments and parks their car at their parents' place for a few weeks. The repo people come around, and, not finding the car they came to collect, decide that in order to pressure your friend they will clamp the wheel of your car. Legal? No way! Can you sue the ass off the repo company? You betcha!

Now to my problem. My ADSL is delivered over a telephone line which my landlord leases, and I only use for ADSL. The landlord and landlord's children use the telephone, and failed to pay for it a few weeks ago, resulting in the line being disconnected. ADSL kept working for several weeks after the disconnection, and then suddenly it just stopped too.

Now - Telstra has a requirement to keep all telephone lines operational for 000 calls, no matter what. That means the copper is connected at all times. That is why the ADSL (which I pay for, and a sizeable portion of that payment goes to Telstra for supplying my data) can be maintained. And Telstra also has a requirement to supply my ADSL because I have paid for it and I am NOT in any default.

What actually happened was that Telstra yanked the code for my connection in order to force my landlord into paying. I have lost over a week of ADSL service which I paid for, and in addition Telstra are charging a reconnection fee for my ADSL, in addition to charging my landlord a reconnection fee.

You can believe that I will be contacting Telstra once my connection is restored, and then my next stop will be a lawyer. And the TIO. Because this amounts to stealing, intentional and deliberate stealing.

Anyhow - while being without a connection:

Bonsai Johnny comes across as arrogant. "Bullshit!" he says "they don't know what they're talking about!" Thanks Baby Bush...

Airlines that will take a dollar from you to sink into a "carbon points" scheme. Hmmm who operates that scheme, where does the majority of your dollar finish up? Do you really truly honestly absolutely believe that this pack of cutthroats who are out to wring you for every cent they can, let alone your dollars, are going to keep their thieving mitts off a dollar that you just give to them? Are we really that naive? Apparently we are.

Future fund - "like Norway, like Russia" - erm Russia's broke... hello... Saying that the future fund is working is like saying that Russia is one of the most affluent countries in the world, it's just plain untrue. Also, we of the Baby Boomer generation spent our lifetimes putting money into the Government in order to have a pension we could live on - it was promised to us that part of our taxes would become our "future fund" - which is patently untrue also, as you can see - first we had to have superannuation as well, and now it turns out that we won't even have enough even with super because we haven't been contributing long enough.
Get used to it kids, Governments lie through their teeth, by the time that so-called "future fund" would have been slated to be used, it would somehow already have vanished through the floorboards. At least this way you get some infrastructure for your tax dollars, if you leave politicians in charge of it it will be just like my pension - a dimly remembered thing that has also been stolen from you by then.

And they aren't going far enough, how about wireless access? Tassie has PAYG power and wireless broadband at a fraction of what I'm paying for a useless ADSL... I would love Wireless broadband here, in one of the most affluent capital cities in Australia, where I can't even keep my ADSL service because Telstra have a very unusual idea of what constitutes service.