Did anyone notice there’s something missing along Winbirra Parade Ashwood? A couple of days ago it dawned on me there was one less Telstra payphone.
I recall some years ago there was a consultation on whether the payphone outside 45 Winbirra Parade Ashwood should be removed but wasn’t aware of anything beyond that.
For the historians in our midst, I’ve collated a number of photos of the payphone taken between 2008 and 2019 courtesy of Google Maps’ Street View, along with one I took on January 7 2021 of the space it used to occupy.
For many years I had a landline phone on my home TPG ADSL account. The phone never really got used all that much but I had decided it was important to keep going. I knew that each call on it would cost me, because from memory I had been charged an up-front credit for phone calls when I opened my account in October 2009.
In transitioning from ADSL to NBN I changed service provider. After I had contracted the new service provider and had my NBN installed I cancelled my TPG ADSL account online. Shortly after doing this I had a call from TPG to find out if there was anything they could do to keep my business. I explained this would not be possible as I was already on the NBN with another service provider.
As it was I had to pay out another month with TPG, as their terms advised they needed 30 days notice, or something to that effect. So be it.
That was all back in August 2019.
On April 23 my bank cancelled and reissued my VISA card as they had detected some overseas fraudulent activity on it. When the new card arrived I went through the rigmarole of updating the new card number on all my accounts. I keep a handy list of these places online for such joyous occasions. As it happened, my TPG account was still on the list.
I tried logging into the TPG portal and lo, I was still able to get in. I wanted to see if they had a stored payment method on file. It turned out their portal doesn’t show any current payment method details on their Update Contact & Payment Details page. It just allows you to provide updated details.
I didn’t recall getting my home phone credit refunded so checked my bank account and saw there were no deposits of $20.54 around that period.
I called TPG and asked them if this credit had been refunded to me. They said they had no record it had been refunded but would look into it. They then sent me an email asking for my bank account details and advised the funds should arrive within 3-5 business days.
The funds turned up as promised:
In summary, if you have a home phone attached to your TPG ADSL account and you cancel the account, make sure you ask for any credit on the account to be refunded.
In trying to change the email address on a Twitter account I was not receiving the confirmation email from Twitter containing the link to validate the change of email address.
After much frustration, and with no luck with using Twitter’s help system, I gave up completely.
Separately, and some time later, someone told me an email they sent me had bounced. I knew the email address was working because I was getting emails from other people addressed to it. I should note that the email address was one that belonged to a domain I manage.
This is the error message they received (which I’ve anonymised):
mailto:user@domain.name all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts or (invalidly) to IP addresses Reporting-MTA: dns; se3-syd.hostedmail.net.au <http://se3-syd.hostedmail.net.au/> Action: failed Final-Recipient: rfc822;mailto:user@domain.name Status: 5.0.0 Diagnostic-Code: smtp; It appears that the DNS operator for domain.name <http://domain.name/> has installed an invalid MX record with an IP address instead of a domain name on the right hand side.
This got me thinking, and made me suspect that it was possible the Twitter verification email was bouncing for the same reason.
I changed the DNS setting for my domain name, replacing the IP address for the MX record with the hostname of the mail server.
I then went to my Twitter profile, requested the confirmation email again, and can report that it promptly arrived, much to my delight.
Ultimately it would be helpful if Twitter’s email verification mechanism reported errors when its verification emails bounce (for whatever reason), rather than doing nothing.
