Patterns

Friday night we decided to drive over to Amsterdam and enjoy the A Day At The Park open air on saturday with Sven Väth and Dubfire. A few colleagues of my beautiful girl had asked us to join them and it sounded like a great idea - except for the weather forecast which promised rain and 16°C, a little unfortunate for an open air.

Still that did not put us off and we decided to go and left around 2p.m. after enjoying breakfast with friends from Leipzig that were on the journey through to Brussels. We arrived two hours later (remind you, Amsterdam is closer than Frankfurt to us) and checked in to a pretty run down hostel place

which called itself a hotel. At least the guy at the reception was very friendly and had a great hint for parking (6€ at the Olympic Stadion including two round-trip tickets for the tram and 24×7 surveillance).

Interesting statue, you won’t see that in Germany, that’s for sure! OK, directly after dropping of zee ride we took the bus to Amsterdamse Bos (after struggling with how-to read the public transportation map for 15 minutes) and walked what must have been around 5km to the open air location.

Upon arrival we were robbed by 70 euros but someone told us later that they call it entrance fee, well whatever.. We did not care about that anymore as we were in:

Dubfire did a good warm up of the crowd though I think he stretched it a bit too much. It was odd that he did not really build a suspense curve throughout his set and instead at the very end played some pretty hard tracks compared to the rest of his set just shortly before Sven Väth started spinning (not very kind to turn up the heat too much just before the main act starts). Talking about Sven Väth, when he arrived shortly before starting his set at 8pm he was smiling and seemed in a great mood as always which reminded me of the fact that he truly is a professional with +25 years of experience in the music industry. The weather was actually awesome being mostly sunny with a few clouds (always important so you don’t get a sunburn) and 20°C warm.

Shortly past 10pm we decided to leave the open air and meet up with Antje’s colleagues which unfortunately weren’t able to make it to the party on time (they arrived at 8:30pm but by the time all tickets were sold out) and missed the action. On our way there we ran into a couple who suggested to go the Berlin Underground party in some in-place instead of going to the official after party (which we didn’t want to anyways as people at the open air started getting a bit too wild the later it got). Already tired but of good cheer we decided to go there and actually enjoyed quite a few nice sets from various DJs from Amsterdam and Berlin (Berlin Underground did not mean they all come from Berlin but they all sound like Berlin).

The rest in one sentence: Going to bed at 3am, breakfast at 9am, leaving for home at 10am, arriving at the Roermond Outlet Center instead at 12pm and finally arriving on our couch at 4pm. Nice weekend!

At the end of last week I received the following response to my support request asking to fix the link betweeen my phone and account number. Apparently the agent working on that task did not understand what I asked them to do (in German only, sorry):

Entschuldigen Sie, dass Sie die Anwendung -Mein T-Home-
für Ihren Anschluss 0203 - xxxxxxx momentan nicht
vollständig nutzen können.

Dieser Fehler tritt zeitweise auf. Bitte versuchen
Sie es zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt noch einmal.

Herr Huptas, wir bedanken uns für Ihr Verständnis.

Für weitere Fragen schreiben Sie uns gern erneut. Sie
erreichen uns jederzeit.

In short this means “try again later” which is what the website already said. Dear friends from Deutsche Telekom: Are you telling me that even when pinpointing where the issue is you are unable to fix it? Why all the hassle with providing support at all?

I am absolutely dissapointed and it reminds me of the experiences I had with Arcor in the past. To me it seems most German telco/ISP companies are unable to provide the service they proclaim in their ads and even worse unable to provide at least capable support staff (of course I knew this all along before I started the VDSL adventure, but being proven right sometimes has a bitter taste to it).

The following small script has been copied over from madboa.com:

#!/bin/sh
#
# usage: retrieve-cert.sh remote.host.name [port]
#
REMHOST=$1
REMPORT=${2:-443}

echo |\
openssl s_client -connect ${REMHOST}:${REMPORT} 2>&1 |\
sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’

Dammit! I spend a good chunk of my free time on the phone with the Deutsche Telekom support the last two weeks without actually moving forward a tiny bit. Currently the status is:

• I am not able to order VDSL (even though all my neighbours are -> we are all connected via the same house connection)
• Deutsche Telekom is not able to send my an invoice (the latest one is from April 2nd)
• My T-Home website is not showing all my customer and connection details (I assume my records are missing a link)

I have to say that I am starting to become a bit frustrated about the whole situation. Even though all call-center agents were kind when talking to them, most of them were unable to even understand what is wrong and what to do about to fix things. Dear friends from Deutsche Telekom, just being nice to customers doesn’t help, you actually need to fix the issues your customers confront you with!

I will wait until the next billing cycle. When they haven’t fixed my data until then resulting in my still being unable to order VDSL I will terminate the contract and forget about their new Entertain packages and VDSL product…

Long time no write…

I’ve been on vacation during the past weeks and on my return last Friday I found a letter from Deutsche Telekom announcing they would install the land line on Tuesday, the 27th of May which is - today!

At 12:23h the service technician rang the bell (absolutely on time, he was scheduled to arrive sometime in the afternoon past 12:00h) and was gone after only 5 minutes went by. The installation went lightning fast (he had to connect two wires in a switchbox in our basement) and now I have a land line from Deutsche Telekom. YAY! The months of waiting, fearing, crying and praying finally payed off…

So what do I do with that land line? I already have one with a call flatrate which works fine. Hm, so let’s first connect a phone to it - *ring* *ring*. How can the phone ring when I did not hand out the phone number to anyone so far?

Interesting, Versatel trying to reach a Mr. Aslan. No, sorry, that’s not me. At least now I now who already owned that number before which makes the new phone number not that shiny and new anymore. Actually it feels kinda worn off to me. OK, enough with the distraction, let’s concentrate on the actual reason why I ordered that phone line in the first place which is: Getting VDSL.

As the online availability check shows that VDSL is not available for this phone number I call the service desk of Deutsche Telekom to find out that there are still processes that need to run in the background and I should call again tomorrow. Now I’m worried… At least he tries to calm me down and performs the check again with the phone number of my neighbour living downstairs which shows VDSL50 availability. Well, so I have to wait for tomorrow it seems (I’m now an expert at waiting you know)…

Ode to Cron

Oh dear master of time

Run those little badly written shell scripts well

Else you will send many people to their own hell

And I will never be able to get VDSL