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		<title>What&apos;s up with these carriers and charging a fee to pay your bill!? &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/03-March/18.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>What&apos;s up with these carriers and charging a fee to pay your bill!?</h1>
			<p>Day 00742: Saturday, 2017 March 18</p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;d planned to head into the T-Mobile store sooner, but there simply hasn&apos;t been time.
		My autopay point is too close though, so I cut off my plan early this morning.
		It rained as I headed to the T-Mobile store to get the new plan activated.
		However, it seems the representative I spoke with before didn&apos;t know what they were talking about.
		They said a prepaid plan without an E911 fee was available.
		No such plan actually exists though.
		A postpaid plan is available, but it requires a credit check and autopay.
		If autopay isn&apos;t enabled, a five-dollar fee is added, and if you pay in person, autopay is automatically disabled.
		I&apos;m tired of these autopay games.
		I asked the representative about reactivating my <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card on my current plan, and it seems they can&apos;t do that in-store.
		If I can&apos;t get this mess sorted out, I might have to buy a new <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card to get my plan back.
		Activating a new tablet <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card took <a href="/en/coursework/UNIV1001/A_conflict_with_T-Mobile.xhtml">four days of arguing with T-Mobile representatives</a> to activate.
		This time, I won&apos;t have an Internet connection with which to argue with them over, which&apos;ll make it even more painful.
	</p>
	<p>
		I considered stopping by my mother&apos;s place on the way home to pick up my jury summons, but I remembered I couldn&apos;t get in.
		I didn&apos;t bring the key to my mother&apos;s place.
		In this situation, it was inconvenient no tot have the key on my main keyring, but in general, it&apos;s good for my sanity.
		Simply knowing that I can&apos;t go over there without warning (and thus, can&apos;t be <strong>*required*</strong> to go over there without warning for any reason) helps me keep thoughts of that place from seeping into daily life.
		Plus, I don&apos;t have to look at the key itself and be directly reminded.
	</p>
	<p>
		Fred Meyer took back the bike lock and returned my money, no questions asked.
		I figured returning it&apos;d be easy, but I expected them to at least ask <strong>*why*</strong> I didn&apos;t want it.
		To be fair though, it <strong>*was*</strong> still in the packaging.
		It&apos;s not like they thought I tried it and it didn&apos;t work out.
	</p>
	<p>
		After reaching home, I decided to try checking in with other local carriers.
		As I said, I&apos;m getting tired of T-Mobile&apos;s autopay games.
		I might switch to a more-expensive carrier just to be done with this idiotic fee nonsense; it&apos;s the principle of the matter, not the cost of the fees itself.
		First, I checked in with MetroPCS.
		Last I knew, they had a pay-in-person fee like T-Mobile proper, but unlike T-Mobile proper, MetroPCS was honest about it.
		I hoped they&apos;d gotten rid of that stupid fee, but as expected, they hadn&apos;t.
		Next, I checked in with Devote30.
		Or rather, I <strong>*tried*</strong> to check in with Devote30.
		They&apos;ve closed up shop and moved to Eugene though!
		So much for a shop I can pay my bill in person at.
		Lastly, I checked in with Cricket.
		They&apos;ve never had a pay-your-bill fee at any time I used their services. However, they&apos;re now adding the same pay-your-bill fee MetroPCS has!
		What&apos;s up with these carriers and charging a fee to pay your bill!?
		In any case, that&apos;s the last of the carriers I know where to find locally.
		I can&apos;t escape this ridiculous fee without giving into their noxious demand that I not pay in cash in person.
	</p>
	<p>
		I tried to fix my account through the Web interface, but the stupid thing is highly limited.
		T-Mobile tablet users are told the interface has been made easier to use, and forced to use this &quot;easier&quot; interface.
		Any attempts to use the main interface originally available to them and still available to smartphone users is met with this message and a link to the new interface.
		However, that interface is a pain and can&apos;t actually do everything you need it to.
		It won&apos;t let me turn my plan back on without switching plans, and it doesn&apos;t offer the option to switch to the one I&apos;m on, as it thinks I&apos;m still on it.
		I tried reaching out to T-Mobile support via their live chat option, but it&apos;s broken at the moment.
		It just silently fails to function.
		I tried disabling Privacy Badger, but that doesn&apos;t fix the issue, so it must be something even screwier on their end.
		I&apos;ve reached out to them on Twitter, and hopefully we can get this fixed up tomorrow.
		Tomorrow will be my last day of service if today isn&apos;t.
	</p>
	<p>
		I ran into my mother after work.
		They saw my bike; I wasn&apos;t ready to admit I had that yet.
		I also let slip a few other things I&apos;d been planning not to.
		I mentioned the bus incident from the other day.
		They asked how my schooling was going, and I blabbed that I&apos;ll have a week off soon.
		I wasn&apos;t ready to commit to spending more time over there on my week off, but it&apos;s likely I&apos;ll be expected to now.
		I need to stay <strong>*away*</strong> from that place so I can recover!
		My mother brought me that jury summons they&apos;d told me about.
		It seems the form they want me to fill out asks if I&apos;m living in Coos County.
		If I&apos;m not, it declares me ineligible for jury duty and demands I provide my current non-Coos address.
		All I have to do to get out of jury duty is tell them where I live.
		Perfect.
		Honestly, I&apos;d like to serve on a jury some time for the experience.
		However, Coos County&apos;s too far away.
		I need a jury assignment within biking distance from home.
	</p>
	<p>
		The cable company finally sent me an actual price via post.
		They&apos;ve been sending me all sorts of advertisements, but none that actually tell what they&apos;re charging.
		Instead, the ads just tell me to come see them in Eugene or telephone them; neither of which is happening.
		The price in their new ad&apos;s actually 25% lower than the representative quoted me, but it requires a one-year service agreement.
		It&apos;s kind of ... too inexpensive not to look into now, at least in terms of dollars.
		I&apos;ll probably contact them again about it, asking what sort of info they need from me.
		Of course, if they demand a Social Security number or something, I&apos;ll have no choice but to refuse.
		I&apos;ll also ask if the price stays low after the year ends without another contract agreement.
		If a steady stream of contract terms are needed to keep the low price, it&apos;s not even worth looking further into.
		However, if I only have to get past the first year ... could it be worth it?
		I&apos;ll have to think on it further if it comes to it.
	</p>
	<p>
		My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="include.d">
	<h2><a href="https://git.volatile.ch./y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></h2>
	<p>
		I came across an interesting fact about what I believe to be the current standard date format: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero#ISO_8601"><abbr title="International Organisation for Standardisation">ISO</abbr> 8601 defines a year zero</a>.
		The problem with the Julian day numbers is that they put day zero off in a distant <abbr title="Before Common Era">BCE</abbr> period.
		Basically, day zero is in year negative four thousand something.
		The lack of a year zero between <abbr title="Before Common Era">BCE</abbr> and <abbr title="Current Era">CE</abbr> is a different issue, but I feel like by defining a year zero, we necessarily define a day zero, which such a year would begin with.
		Year zero is a much more sensible place to begin numbering days from.
	</p>
	<p>
		I decided to leave the default date for my <code>\st\y\datetime</code> class as 1970-01-01 00:00:00, but I wanted to add two class constants to my <code>\st\y\day_number</code> class to allow easy use of a Julian day count or an <abbr title="International Organisation for Standardisation">ISO</abbr>-8601-based day count.
		That didn&apos;t go as well as I wanted it to though.
		<abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr>&apos;s <code>...</code> operator will unpack elements of an array only as the <strong>*final*</strong> arguments passed to a function, not the starting arguments.
		The current constructor of my class takes the date of day zero as the first three arguments, as they&apos;re the most likely to not be left on the default (and for now, a default doesn&apos;t exist), then takes other optional arguments after it.
		I either need to alter the constructor in an incompatible way or ignore the fact that passing further arguments to the constructor will require copying the array from the class constant, adding to it, then passing the new array into the constructor method using the <code>...</code> operator.
		Obviously, the copy/alter array trick is messy; my users deserve better.
		That said, my users also deserve better than an ever-shifting <abbr title="application programming interface">API</abbr> of incompatible changes.
	</p>
</section>
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