Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Moving premises can have all manner of hidden traps. Here's one to watch for

Who Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader folk, to that buffer between the weekend and the workaday we call Who, Me? in which Register readers turn raconteur and recount tales of tech gone wrong.

This tale comes from a reader we'll Regomize as "Ethan" though he doesn't really need his identity protected as he appears to be blameless. That's his story, anyway.

(An aside, if you will indulge. Ethan's story struck a nerve with your humble correspondent, as this particular vulture is in the process even as we sit here of relocating to a new nest. It's a stressful thing, as I'm sure many can relate, and this is exactly the kind of thing that scares me.)

Ethan used to work for a company that had a leased 200Mbps line provided by Provider A (whose identity probably does need protection), which cost about $1,600 per month. Perfectly reasonable. For reasons Ethan does not spell out, the company decided to move from its top-floor digs down to ground level. Got sick of the views, maybe. Who knows. Not Who Me?

Anyway, at much the same time as Ethan's employer decided to move, Provider A got in touch and announced it was switching its "last mile" service to Provider B, and would need to create a new connection at the premises.

Great, thought Ethan, we can kill two birds with one stone.

If only it were that easy. Turns out birds can fly and stones are really heavy.

(Back to that aside: the new nest is going to require your correspondent to switch to a new telco provider as well. This really is hitting very close to home, as it were.)

The new connection happened, the office move happened, the switch to provider B happened, and all seemed well in Ethan's world.

Until, 10 months or so down the track, someone audited monthly expenses. It seemed that Provider A was being paid $3200 per month. Which couldn't be right, could it?

Well it turned out that in the whole mess of setting up a new connection at the same time as disconnecting and moving the connection downstairs, no-one had bothered actually switching off the connection to the old office upstairs.

The old office where no one worked. Ethan's company was paying for a service that had exactly zero users.

You can imagine how successful Ethan was in getting either provider to cough up a refund.

Have you ever been left with the bill for a switch no one flipped? Tell us all about it in an email to Who, Me? and we'll share your tale with the world. ®