Back in the 90’s, internet technology was rapidly evolving and improving, which often meant lots of upgrades in a given area.

What would you do if your internet service provider said you owed them thousands of dollars for unpaid usage, but they were willing to forgive it so they could upgrade the service in your area?

That is the weird situation the guy in this story found himself in, but he declined saying that they should refund what he already paid, which meant the upgrades were held up until the company agreed.

Check it out.

You sure you want your money? Fine you’re gonna get every penny.

This guy, we’ll call him G, was pretty wealthy.

Dude had a nepo job where he “worked” in a factory fixing the machinery which almost literally never broke.

Someone always had to be on duty to be ready for repairs, so he got all kinds of overtime and was being paid almost $75/hr in the early 00’s.

To give you an idea of the kind of money he was making and how he didn’t care.

That is a lot of money back then.

He spent most whole days sitting around watching movies on a personal laptop that he had spent over $2000 on and just left it at his desk.

If he had a call to the floor it would take him no more than an hour and that would happen maybe three times in a week.

Holidays where 2.5x pay and he worked every one of them.

This guy was a bit of a tech nerd and he got an ISDN account as soon as it came out.

For you youngins or folks who weren’t savvy at the time, ISDN was basically two 56.6kbps modems smooshed together.

This was back when 56.6k was as good as it got for residential and you could still pay for slower.

So, fast (for it’s day).

Back in the days of dial-up, the dark ages, some services would be paid by the minute of usage in addition to your monthly bill and that’s how this worked.

The Internet was painfully slow, but still amazing.

Also, because “dial-up” was literal and used existing infrastructure, you could take your modem with you and use it somewhere else by logging into your account from a new location and dialing the closest number to you.

This was also back in the day of long distance charges.

Now for the actual story.

G just got his ISDN modem and after a day or so took it to his brother’s house one town over to show him how fast it was and after they played around on the internet for a bit, G had to go to work and he would be doing some long shifts for the next couple of days, so his brother asked to borrow his modem, which G said was fine.

I don’t understand exactly how it happened but his brother had signed into a long distance number and then forget to shut the connection down.

And then G got his first months’ bill.

It was over $14,000 dollars.

He immediately called the service provider and explained the situation and they basically told him “you signed a contract, sucks to suck. We want our money”.

He relented and set up a payment plan.

He would also be required to keep the contract going until the bill was fully paid.

Now, if you’ve never even heard of ISDN, even if you’re 30+ years old, I don’t blame you.

ISDN was around for a while, but only for niche uses.

This was a very short lived technology and was replaced by DSL just a couple years later but unlike ISDN, DSL required new infrastructure and for some reason I don’t fully understand.

I have guessed is probably the way some important switch on the service provider’s network was set up, the two services could not coexist in the same small region.

Regions the size of like a neighborhood.

And G lived in a pretty nice neighborhood, not mansions but upper middle class.

The best neighborhood our small town had to offer, in fact, and people just wanted DSL.

It was the first time the Internet was getting close to recognizable as it is today cause it was so, so much faster than what was previously available.

The folks in this neighborhood wanted those speeds and did not like being told that they couldn’t have it.

So, service provider, calls up G and explained the situation and offered to wave the remaining amount of the bill.

G told them the whole bill was unfair and asked if they would refund what he had already paid but they just told him no way.

Que malicious compliance.

G tells them he has a contract and points out that they are obligated to fulfill their end of the contract and he will be paying his bill in full and hung up.

He keeps paying.

Service provider keeps getting a calls from more customers wanting DSL and folks who had previously called, calling back more and more irate.

G gets another call, then another, until Service Provider decides to just tell people exactly who is responsible for their neighborhood’s lack of DSL service.

I don’t blame him, it is the DSL company’s decision.

His neighbors let loose on him, but does G care?

Not at all, just keeps paying his bill.

This went on for more than a year, eventually service provider just decided to get rid of ISDN completely as it was a legitimately outdated technology and did forgive the remainder of G’s bill since they weren’t fulfilling their end of their contract but the whole thing was just wonderful.

It seems he really had them over a barrel.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think about this story.

This really doesn’t make much sense.

Exactly, it didn’t benefit himself at all.

This comment says the company could just forgive the debt.

Here is someone who says he still paid the bill, so he lost out.

This person thinks he owes the money.

This is a great story, if it is true.

Reddit has its doubts.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.