Today my wife accidently knocked out the power to our desktop PC, printer and DSL router. No big deal, plug it back in and everything boots up. Except we didn't seem to have any internet connectivity. It turns out my ISP had 'parked' my account for non payment. They had emailed me about a problem with my bank but I use my own domain for email and they didn't know so I didn't get the mail.
Anyway, the funny thing is that after sending me 15 emails and getting no reply, they parked my account on the 12th of October. But all that did was invalidate my password. And my password is only used when my router initially powers on and establishes a PPPoA connection to the ISP. Since we never turn it off, our connection never got dropped and for the past 18 days we've been happily using a 'parked' account. I wonder how long it would have gone on without the power cord mishap :-)
