He’s Paying Off A Massive Internet Bill In Monthly Installments, But He Won’t Accept Having The Rest Forgiven Unless They Refund Everything He’s Already Paid
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When you have a lot of money, you can make decisions based on principal instead of what’s best for your finances.
In this story, one fairly well off homeowner had accidentally racked up a huge bill when he let his brother borrow his ISDN modem. He worked out a deal with the ISP to pay it off in monthly installments, but that ended up being a huge problem when the ISP wanted to upgrade the neighborhood to DSL.
They offered the homeowner a deal that he refused to take based on principal.
The ISP was upset. The neighbors were upset. The homeowner didn’t care.
Keep reading to see how the story plays 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.
He had a lot of free time.
To give you an idea of the kind of money he was making and how he didn’t care. 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.
He was tech savvy for his time.
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 af (for it’s day).
Here’s some more information about how dial-up worked.
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.
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’s brother accidentally made a big mistake.
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.
The service provider had no mercy.
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. 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 but 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.
G’s neighbors wanted DSL.
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.
The service provider wanted to provide the neighborhood with DSL.
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 nonsense and asked if they would refund what he had already paid.
But they refused.
Que malicious compliance.
G was being really stubborn about it.
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.
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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.
The neighbors were upset.
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.
I wish it had ended with the ISP paying G back for everything he had paid like he asked them to.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person notices a major flaw in the story.
Another person thinks it only makes sense that G was responsible for paying the bill.
This person doesn’t understand how anything that happened would be malicious compliance.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a college student who decides to send his university a counter-bill after they try to get him to pay “inconvenience fees.”
Another person would’ve stopped paying the bill.
I would’ve been happy to stop paying the bill if given the opportunity. All he did was annoy his neighbors by refusing to comply with the ISP.
I get that he wanted a refund, but continuing to pay didn’t hurt anyone except himself.
Some people are way too stubborn.
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