"We will never ask you for your password"

Today, my Internet broke. More accurately, I lost the capability to visit websites. Every website I tried to visit redirected to 'http://redirect.telenet.be/something' (Telenet being my ISP). Mind you, this is hardly an exceptional situation. Telenet often redirects every website you request for reasons such as "You reached 90% of the volume you are allowed to download this month. Would you like to continue downloading or would you like to continue downloading?".

What's special about this time, is that instead of actually showing me the page on which you can choose to continue surfing, I got an Apache 500 error page with a large backtrace. Today might turn out to be fun after all.

This is obviously a problem I can't fix myself, hence I spend the next 15 minutes listening to crappy classical music while waiting for a line to open. I explain the problem and the guy at the other end tells me to call another number. Great.

Unlike the Tier 1 support guy, this guy sounds like he's actually doing something. I can hear him clicking and sighing in the background. "Hmm, that's a weird error code...", he mumbles. "Unfortunately, there's nothing I myself can do for you. I'll have to launch an official investigation and ehm, I'll need your password". "Which password?", I ask him. "The one you use to log onto [ISP site]". I give my phone the stink eye and ask "Are you serious?". "Yes", he tells me, "if you insist, I can also tell them to reset your password, but then the investigation will take longer and you'll also have a new password. Just to be clear, you don't have to give me your password, and you should also know you can change the password at any time." I take a deep sigh and spell out my password.

The support guy and I agree that with some luck, the problem should (temporarily) fix itself tonight, because the amount of traffic consumed will be reset at 00:00h, just like it has on the 16th of every month the last few years.

We hang up and I spend the next few hours anxiously chatting on Live Messenger (like I said before, only HTTP(S) traffic was blocked), hoping I won't have to spend the next week without Internet, waiting for some programmer to write a 2 line long fix. Luckily, the problem did indeed resolve itself a little over midnight. I'm just hoping they fix it before it occurs again.

Who would have guessed my first post would turn out to be an angry rant. I'm feeling like a real blogger already.