Paying the Internets

Each month, my Internet Service Provider’s bill touts their online payment system as a way to save time and stamps.  I’ve been a customer long enough, so I thought I’d give it a try.

When I visited the web link they advertise on the bill, I’m sent to their company portal where I have to login with an account that I have used only for the two times over the last ten years when I’ve had to contact the ISP.

Issue #1: the userID, based on an email address, has a number in it.  I have too many accounts and logins to remember yet another one.

Issue #2: the ISP has been bought out three times, each time changing the domain.  Why bother spamming my friends when I can buy my own domain?

Issue #3: even with the account sent on aggressive spam filtering, it gets a lot of spam from brute-force attacks.

Upon entering what I thought was my password, I was sent to a broken page.  Weird.  Thinking it was possible that the account had been deleted from lack of use, I tried creating one.  No user ID I’d be able to remember (without writing down) was available.  After trial and error, I came up with Benders3321ShinyMetalAss.

But that wouldn’t login, either.

After clicking around some more, it dawns on me: the site doesn’t work with Firefox!  Their infrastucture specifies Internet Explorer 5.0 (known for its porous security model) or Netscape 6.2. Netscape? Are they still in business? (Oh, wait, they’re an AOL portal and a dial-up internet company now.)

With IE 6.0, I’m able to login using my original account.  The sign-up process is annoying.  After entering my credit card, I’m presented with a series of terms and conditions that looks like this:

The first part says this automatically waives any paper copies of correspondence.  Then there’s some stuff about kneeling before Zod, too.  The fucktards that created this put it in a small text box so no one will read this stuff.  I didn’t want to either, and hit “Cancel.”

I tried the “one-time” payment option.  No consent form!  Again, I enter in my credit card and the payment amount from my paper statement.  I hit OK and get this message:

You are attempting to pay more than the current balance owed.

*Note: If you are a new Comcast customer, you may be receiving this message because we don’t have accurate information on your amount due. Please refer to your paper bill to confirm the correct amount due.

Paper payment is looking a lot less complicated!