Hello again. Apologies for the prolonged radio silence. That was due to a number of factors. Firstly I was in England over Christmas and New Year, staying at my daughter's. Although she's online, I tried to stay off the internet as much as possible. It seemed a bit unsociable, or maybe just unfestive, to spend time communing with a cyber world when in someone else's house, and in any case she (my daughter) has made no secret in the past of her disapproval of my blogging activities!

I have also been pondering the future of D&D. It had been a major focus of my life last year, with the result that the weeks flashed by like days, while other things got neglected - family, reading - especially of books and keeping abreast of new ideas.

I had decided in principle that with the novelty of personal blogging on the wane, especially with the improving credibility and self-regulation of My Telegraph, 2008 would be the year when I retracted from the blogosphere. That applies especially to this particular site with its high demands on time and nervous energy. I want to try to restore some balance in my life.

But an entirely new and sinister factor has crept in since September or thereabouts that has caused my thoughts to crystallise on priorities and re-directions for D&D.

It's difficult, nay well nigh impossible, to blog with confidence when fearful of losing one's internet connection at random points throughout the day. Yet that has been my predicament for several months now.

Way back in early October I described difficulties I was having with my modem connection, and my failure to get my ISP (AOL Neuf Cegetel- now wholly French owned) to take my complaint seriously and provide a replacement modem. Link

At the time it seemed I was dealing simply with a mixture of inertia and incompetence. However, things got progressively worse towards Christmas, with acute connection problems in December while all the time being continually pressurised by AOL Neuf to sign up to a new contract. Matters came to a head yesterday with complete loss of connection for some 12 hours, with an hour spent on the phone being browbeaten and subjected to the third-degree. Almost everything we said about the modem and its faulty lead was contemptuously dismissed. Instead we were bombarded with checklists of other things that were considered more probable causes of our difficulties - the phone line, the filters, our computer, our software etc etc. Yet we have only to jiggle the modem lead slightly, and we lose our connection, which may takes an hour or more of patient re-jiggling to restore !

In view of this systematic obfuscation, I now believe the problem with AOL to be far more serious than I had originally assumed. There is now a disturbing and sinister element - for me the customer to be browbeaten and humiliated in this fashion. To be told, for example, that there is no record on AOL's system of our phone calls in September and the promised action is to my way of thinking a huge black mark against our Internet Service Provider. Fortunately I blogged on the subject on October 3rd, and have itemised phone bills to back up my version of events. I now feel feel like David girding up his loins to confront Goliath - although I take some heart from knowing how that story ended.

For the forseeable future, D&D will restrict itself to documenting the strange and worrying course of events of my current dealings with AOL. When faced with what appears to be systematic moving of contractual goalposts, coercion, time-wasting and possibly more serious charges, I think it is important to get the facts down fair and square in the public domain. I shall be using this site for the English-language version of events, whilst accepting that the failings of a French-based ISP will be of limited interest to a UK readership. However, I shall also be putting French translations up on my old D&D (blogspot) site, since anything on that site is indexed by worldwide Google, and will ultimately I hope bring AOL Neuf the kind of publicity on its homeground- in France- that it so richly deserves.

Hearing my daughter's recent experiences with her mobile phone/internet provider (Virgin) with a similar convenient "loss" of records of phone calls convinces me there are growing abuses of power within the electronic service industry: far from being service providers, we are seeing the rampant growth of contractual lock-in merchants (for want of a better name). These operators, most of them household names, are increasingly unfussy about the methods they use to massage their balance sheets. Every customer, present or prospective, is considered fair game - an innocent abroad- to be conned, coerced, and manipulated. To describe their business model as a principle-free zone would probably be to err on the side of politeness.

AOL has blighted my daily existence for the best part of 4 months, now: yesterday both my wife and I felt we had been put through a wringer.

It will take a number of posts to do justice to the way in which something that should be simple and unobtrusive has come to haunt our daily lives. But that is the task I have now set myself - to document a nasty and vicious form of exploitation that has infected 21st century commerce - one that has crept up on all of us by degrees, and which has grown largely unchecked through a failure of interest or vigilance on the part of the mainstream media.

Public duty calls, even if it means D&D adopting a single-issue mode for the forseeable future. Everything else in my life pales into insignificance when I feel that someone to whom I pay 26.89 euros a month for internet access is being deliberately obstructive and unhelpful, and trying to foist a new contract on me whether I want it or not. I am still waiting for a reply to the letter I sent to AOL's Head Office two weeks ago, reminding them that there are two parties to a contract.

Update: Friday 18th Jan See the post by the estimable "Goth Queen" on MyT, entitled "Internet Provider Nightmare", describing a similar runaround to ours. The post itself did not identify the ISP, but its name is revealed later in the comments. No prizes for guessing who is making Goth Queen's life a misery!

Update Tue 22nd Jan 14:40 approx.

Again, lost internet connection. No lights on modem, on-screen message saying I needed to reconnect first with dial-up (bas debit, metered).I ignored that message, and instead jiggled the modem lead and after a while got back on-line. One wonders how much longer this nonsense will continue, before AOL-Neuf realises that by failing to replace my modem, with its faulty lead and/or USB plug, as promised, way back in September last year, it is failing to deliver on its contractual obligations. A financial settlement, when it comes, as it surely will sooner or later (probably the latter) will have to compensate not just for wasted time, but for the unending disruption caused to our lives by failure to rectify a small mechanical fault in a modem lead. What is it that prevents AOL Neuf doing something so simple and straightforward as replacing a 4 year old modem?
Update: Tue (still) 20:35 approx. Session interrupted by one of the AOL Error boxes that freeze the system and won't delete, necessitating a time-consuming reboot.
Now finding that I am unable to access my regular sites from the default browser. Thanks to Firefox I am still online. this is a repetition of what happened for a week or two before Christmas. What a shambolic ISP I find myself landed with. AOL Neuf - you are the pits.

Update: Thur 24th Jan: I had trouble booting up this morning. The process got stuck at Stages 5 or 6, and kept flashing up a message saying the computer would have to be re-started (another wasted 5 minutes).

So I rebooted, all the while thinking: what if it fails to connect? What then? Go back to the so-called Help Line, going through all that tedious round of questions, all the while racking up a big addition to the phone bill (typically 10 euros or more if they keep you on the line for 30 minutes). There's no point in emailing- they just bounce them back. There's no point in writing: you wait 2 or 3 weeks for a reply, which totally ignores one's specific complaint.

Since this has been going on since September of last year, I am beginning to smell a rat, and on googling discover that AOL-France, prior to its takeover by Cegetel, had indeeed fallen foul of French law on matters relating to failure to honour its contractual obligations (which is putting it politely). I'll add a small piece in a day or two.

Link to French language version on (Old) Dreams and Daemons