IT blues

I moved to another state and had to switch ISP providers. Not wanting to go back to cable ISP because the cable providers which service my 'hood suck to the nth degree, I took on DSL for the first time.

It's actually working pretty well, at least it will until they shut it off because I haven't paid the bill.

Why haven't I paid it? Because I opted for online billing, and can't log in to pay the damn bill. I can't seem to recall my username, and misplaced the paperwork on which I wrote it. I am up to my elbows in boxes and papers; I think I can be forgiven. The email I used to register the DSL isn't being accepted by the billpay website, even though other parts of their website (including my ISP email site) accepts the email addy as legit.

I've called their tech support and eventually got to a human on the third call (and after I tried the online chat feature). Eventually they connected me to "billing," which turned out to be an automated voice which told me to go to their website, log on, and pay the bill there, and then the call ended without warning.

Go to their website to pay the bill? How novel! I wish I'd thought of that myself!

The funny thing is, while I was on the phone with a human, she actually told me she could see on my account that I had in fact registered, had in fact completed the bevy of security questions, and do in fact have a user name and password. Can you give me my user name and password, I ask. No. What if you ask me the security questions, I ask. Sorry, I'm not authorized... All she could give me was my new email addy at their ISP--which didn't help me solve my problem.

Exactly how does one get through this? It appears I'm going to have to telephone the company's collections dept, the one that services delinquent accounts, every month until I give up the will to live and cancel their account.

And no, this is not some small-potatoes operation. I chose a nationwide service. Perhaps that's where I went wrong in the first place.

Any ideas, dearest readers?