1) Virgin Mobile has never given us significant billing problems for years now, I just put a credit card on file with them, and they ding it $15 for each account (3 of them) every 3 months (we don't use phones much). But since putting daughter on a complete plan with unlimited text+voice at $50, the charge has not gone through cleanly ONCE. Even if I go to their website and retry the card, change cards, whatever, it never goes through. She loses phone service, emails me, I call, fight through their automation, get a droid to manually force the charge, wait a month, repeat.
This time I'm going to ask them if they're TRYING to force us to another service.
2) They're switching to another new VPN service at work. This one requires an authentication certificate that's keyed to a specific computer. I have to follow a link, log in, add a certificate to the shopping cart (at 1 penny cost), enter a business justification, submit the order, wait until my boss OKs the order, then order processing forwards it to the machine, it sends me an email with a link to my work address, I forward the email and follow the link, log in (must be with Internet Explorer), click through a bunch of junk, allow it to install an activeX control to generate a keyed request, then wait until the next day for them to process that and generate a certificate, get an email, forward that to home, follow the link (again, must be with IE), allow it to install the certificate.
Now I have a certificate installed, but no VPN software; to do that, you have to ask someone who's already done it because they apparently can't manage to send an email around telling you where to find the software despite dozens of complaints over the last few weeks.
And yes, the certificate is going to be installed on a virtual machine. Anything that screwed up is not coming near my machine. Besides, that way I only need to go through this crap once, then I can replicate the VM.
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