Bell

PI has blogged most of the latest Bell drama, but he failed to mention that the reason the Bell bill had, in theory, been closed last time was because he found the receipt for the return of the modem. This proved to them that we could not possibly have been using their service during the time after the modem was returned and, since we'd canceled the account before that anyway they should have stopped billing us when we told them to stop billing us.

I hate Bell. I know you've heard that from me about a million times now, but I really hate them. The next time I hear from them for any reason I'm going to file a complaint w/ the Better Business Bureau!

We have just bought the cat an harness and a leash in the hopes of making him an happier cat. He's been acting rather depressed lately and trying to go out. So far we've only been taking him for walks in the hall way. He's too scared to even go as far as the elevator. So PI tried to put the harness on the cat a couple of days ago. The first problem w/ this is that, b/c there's a bell on it, he thinks it's a toy and attacks it. Once PI actually got the harness on him he seems to think he can't stand up in it. You pick the cat up, put him on his feet, and he just slumps over sideways.

To date, the cat has only gone for 1 slump down the hall way. It takes almost half an hr to get him into the harness and he only stays out for 5 minutes before PI gets annoyed that he's just lying there or 5 gets scared and comes back in.

*sigh*
Yes MT, I know you warned us, but we still hope to prevail.

Well, I thought I'd seen the last of Bell, but apparently not. L just got a stack of bills for the internet. It took them a while to track her down. We cancelled the account in April. The bills are for May ->

I hate Bell and I'm beginning to wonder if they're trying to piss me off on purpose.

ok
so bell has now perpitrated the biggest f#%^ up of all time!!!!!
if you remember my posts from sept i mentioned how we transferred the line from london to toronto, had a bit of a fiasco w/ that. for some incomprehensible reason they left the line open in london but did not charge us for it. L actually called and asked them to charge for it but they said that that was not possible. they actually refused to bill her for the service.
today, pi recieved a bell bill. keeping in mind that he cancelled his service (including a dsl line he was not paying for and could not use) over a month ago, this was a bit of shock. an even greater shock is the fact that, although he has paid all of his bills up until the time at which he cancelled the service, this bill is for june - sept 2005. also, although the bill is actually in his phone number and in his name there are large long distance charges to numbers that are in the same area code. in fact, to a house that he could walk to in less than half an hr. there is also a call to san francisco and several calls to yellow knife.
needless to say, he is not paying that bill. the calls were not made from his phone number. pi is going to call them on wed to sort it out. i really want to be in on that phone call!!!

grumble grumble grumble $%^&* bell %^&* grumble

well, as per usual i'm having trouble w/ bell. my internet has gone down or flaky almost every week since they set it up. i have called bell several times and they keep saying it's fixed...then i get to call again a day or 2 later to tell them no it isn't 'casue it's down again. luckily, the ppl in their billind dpt are reasonable and see things my way. ie, i shouldn't be paying for service i'm not getting...so my bill has been reduced every month so far. this month they're realizing that i'm becoming an expensive customer and they'd better fix it, so they put in an escalated work order and are going to check EVERYTHING. we'll see how it goes :P

so guess what
i don't have internet again!
f*****g bell!!!

the continuing saga of my problems with bell:

When I transferred my phone line out of my aparement in L and into PI's apartment in T in april I used the online form to do the transfer. Aparently they didn't get the request so we had to wait another week while they sorted it out and transferred the number. When i emailed my room mate to tell her that the line had been transferred and not to worry she said the line was still working. After a bit of humming and hawing I called bell to ask if we could just have our old number back. Aparenly an answer (whether yes or no) costs $30. I gave up and my room mate called. She told them she wasn't going to pay them $30 'cause she was still able to make and receive calls on the old number and knew it was still free. They told her that was impossible and, after some arguing, she gave up and had a free phone connection for 4 months.

As well as this, the day the phone at PI's was supposed to be working we plugged it and got no dial tone. We called Bell and asked them what was wrong. They said they couldn't hook up a new phone line until their technicians came off strike. We said we'd had a phone line in the exact same apartment less than a year ago and they didn't need to put in a new line. They said there wasn't one existing at that address and we told them there were at least 4 existing at this address, 2 of which were not in use, make one work! They said they'd send someone over in less than 10 days if we could be home during the day to meet them. About 4 days later the phone just started working on its own.

When I called in Aug to have the internet reactivated in L (I had put it on hold) they said fine. As far as I know we had internet for about a week before the phone line finally died (as it was supposed to 4 months before). This left us w/o internet or a phone. I called bell and asked them to hook us back up with a new number since I wasn't about to pay them $30 to get the old number back. They said that would be fine and they could do it w/i 3 business days, which they did. They asked if I would like to order sympatico as well and I said yes. When they transferred me to sympatico the person there told me I couldn't activate internet on a phone number that didn't exist call back when I had a working phone. What was the point of that?!

I called back when the phone started working and they siad they would hook my internet up to my new phone number in 4-5 days (this being day 3 after the phone was dealt with). they called me back on day 3 of the 4-5 to tell me that they were still experiencing delays because of the strike they had this summer and couldn't hook me up before the 27th of sept (that was the 19th). in the mean time would I like a free unlimited dial up? sure I would. Better than nothing.

Yesterday I noticed that the dsl light was on on my modem but i wasn't getting an internet connection. I was too tired to deal with it. Today when I was working on my computer my mail notifier told me I had mail. I thought that was off considering I didn't have an internet connection. I opened my mail and aparently I DO have a connection! Except that it dies every 5 mins or so. I called Bell and they said that no, they had not set up my connection yet, no they could not do it any sooner than the 27th, and no, it was not possible that I had a connection anyway.

The long and the short of it is, I appologize to anyone trying to talk to me online since I drop off line every 5-10 mins for a bit.

well, it's been a while since i've posted, but there's good reason for that :)

sept 2
s and d got married!!!! congrats s and d!!!
it was a really nice wedding. the food was great, the venue was nice, it was great to see ppl again, and i actually danced!

sept 3
chapel in the morning. it was also nice to be back at that.
followed by collective crew lunch
stratford - as you like it - w/ pm and pi :D it was great

sept 4
back to TO to spend 1 day cleaning up from the flood
we still haven't had time to unpack everything yet
pack for school and the wedding since i'm not going back until the oscc meeting and pi won't be home until after the wedding

sept 5
collect tuxes for the wedding, the guys go out and t and i stay home to do place cards, lable presents, and consume much wine and chinese food

sept 6-10
move to pi's parent's house and start wedding prep
huge amounts of shopping and insane prep later...

sept 10
WEDDING
it was a great ceremony and a great party.
the food was super and hopefully d will do our wedding too :)

sept 11
i's birthday
move back to london

sept 13
start classes

now things are relatively back to normal except that i don't have phone or internet and won't for another week yet *sigh* i hate bell!

you know bell charges $35 just to CHECK if a number you want can be assigned to you?! doesn't matter what the answer is, it's $35 to check! wondering if we shouldn't just change to vonage now and get it over with!

pi and i were both home sick yesterday. pi had managed to kill his back, neck, and wrist. he's on pills for one and has exercises for the other and we bought a new mattress to help with it as well. sooooooo comfy!!! i seem to have redeveloped the case of tmj i had in first year and have exercises to help w/ that as well. the smog, my posture, and stress are aparently what cause the headaches and muscle spasms.

in other news, i seem to have ireperably damaged my stapler :(

despite that, i'm in a good mood as tomorrow is our anniversary :) we're going to have a movie and dinner. also going on the company boat cruise on sat.

well, the bell man came and fixed our phone.
aparently my answering machine blew up something in the jack.
so we don't have an answering machine anymore.
on a similar note, liane's gone to argue with zellers about our toaster. we bought it in may and it's stopped working...1 month w/i the warenty still! so hopefully when i get home from the party tonight i will be coming home to a new toaster.

i hate bell!
they are stupid and useless!
i got back to london this weekend to find that the phone had stopped working as had the internet. they're aparently not related since the internet stopped working on saturday and the phone on friday and the net's back up now, but that, too, is just stupid. the phone sounds like there's a phone off the hook somewhere in the house. we've checked every jack and phone and there's isn't a phone off the hook. if you try to call me you'll currently get a busy signal. as this is only the continuing saga of the bell screw up i don't expect to recieve a bill for this month's services on phone OR internet! *grrrrrrrrrrrrr*

in other news, this weekend was probably more interesting that it should have been.
i came home after class on wed to see a concert that pi and i had won tickets for at pi's cousin's stag and doe this summer. it was a good show and we had fun. (i do'nt have classes on thurs). i was going to spend friday doing my readings for class since i certainly have enough of them. but as i was sitting down to do them fish came online and, since i hadn't seen her in 5 months and she just happened to be home from school on friday we made lunch plans...which evolved into late in the afternoon plans....which evolved into dinner plans....pi and i got home at about 1 am. as it was yom kippur and a friday we had a nice meal w/ fish's brothers and 3 or 4 friends that dropped in. pi met us at fish's house after he had finished work...and would have been there sooner had he not had an adventure - which i'll let him tell - on the way.

on sat we slept in since it was the only day we'd have to do so....and we'd gotten home at 1...and that was great. then we went to my parent's place for the 'first annual dodge rd street festival'. it was organized by a neighbour down the street who realized he didn't know anyone in the neighbourhood and invited everyone to his front yard for dinner. it was a lot of fun, but it took us a long time to get over there. dad, pi, and i left the house and made it as far as the end of the porch before i asked pi if he had his keys...which we decided it wasn't worth it to go back for. then we made it as far as the end of the drive way before dad realized that, although he had put the food in containers to take to the bbq, he had not removed said containers from the counter, so we went back for them. then, once outside, but before we locked the door this time, we figured we should go back for pi's keys. we made it to the corner before mom pulled up behind us and honked and we had to go back to get her. on the next attempt we made it to the steps in the middle of the lawn before she realized she needed money and we went back for some. the bbq was basically uneventful. one of the ladies had a fireman for an husband and he came by w/ a truck and let the kids climb all over it which was really nice.
we left early 'cause we were supposed to be going to the opera that night (lucia de lammermore). mom passed out the tickets and went upstairs to change. pi, sitting on the stairs mentioned that he thought mom had said that the show started at 8...but his ticket said 7.30.....so we rushed out of the house at just a bit after 7 and still managed to make it there 15 mins early. when the opera was over and got back to the car the door was wide open. turns out that dad had locked it and just simply forgot to bother shutting it...good thing the light was already burnt out or we'd have had no battery to start the car with! on our way out (via the church street exit so that bear could show us where her bf worked) we got behind this lady trying to put her receipt in the slot and get out of the parking lot. we were the only ones behind her when we arrived, but by the time the attendant got ticked enough to come and see what was going on there were 7 cars behind us. turns out she was supposed to have collected a ticket to put in the slot when she'd paid and the receipt wouldn't have fit anyway. so the attendent let her out since she'd paid and dad stuck his credit card in the slot. then the screen said that he had paid and taken his credit card, but he couldn't get it out of the slot. when he finally did claw it out of the slot i don't want to know how many ppl were behind us. the gate wouldn't open. the attendent, looking extremely pissed off came and took our receipt out of the machine at which pt the gate opened and we left. we got home at midnight.

on sunday we got up early so that i could do a demo and, after that, drove to pi's parent's place. i had my first souffle, which i liked and will have to learn to make, a nice sit and talk on the porch in lovely weather, a fairly long nap, and tomato soup and grilled cheese for dinner. we arrived in london at about 12...to discover that bell is more annoying than i thought possible!

class today
i'm done now

hello all you ppl going back to school :D
i'm back and (no "i told you so"s ppl) it's good to be back
7 of us went out for ice cream at demetry's last night and it was, as per usual w/ that company, hillarious.
as per usual i also hate bell and they've screwed everything up.
they lost the order to transfer the line so i didn't have a phone when i got here and had to wait 2 days for it to get here, they hooked my internet up to a number that doesn't exist, billed me $30 for it, and told me i can't have internet for at min 3 more days now 'cause they can't hook up the net to a non-existant number (even though i have an active number now and it had been set up on a canceled number for over a week)...so after pi spending over half an hr on the phone today tryign to sort it out we gave up and drove to a bell store where we got the run around in person in much less time! very exciting *gak*
oh well
currently working on a very interesting hack job that gives me dial up....waiting.....waiting.....
classes start tomorrow and after that i go back to toronto until sun night 'cause of pi's brother's birthday.
back to london sun night
back to toronto wed night 'cause pi has to work on thurs
back to london thurs night after work 'cause i have class on fri
back to toronto fri night 'cause we have to be in toronto on sat and sun....sept is a bit of a right off as far as organization goes *sigh* some things never change

i still hate bell, but at least they know i exist. ....how do you read this thing?

*grumble* stupid bell *grumble*

must read.....toooooooo tired!
*yawn*




.....sorry, dropped off......ok, i'm going now

I HATE BELL!!!!!!! stupid phone company *grumble grumble grumble*
who ever heard of a 2 min lag on highspeed? what kind of high speed is that?