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Verizon Refuses To Provide Complete IPv6
Glendale2x writes "I'm a progressive sort of guy and I want to go full dual-stack, IPv6 for the future, etc. However I recently tried to turn up a new Verizon circuit with IPv6 (after a 6-month fiber install process), and to my chagrin the order they accepted back in May they're now saying is against their policy to provide. They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it. Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?"
They'd damn well better give you a full refund if that v6 was an essential part of the contract.
If verizon's pulling this shit AND trying to keep your money they need their asses spanked in court, big time.
From the EVIL 29% of the internet.
IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.
It takes a lot longer than 2 years to develop a networking standard, and gain acceptance from the community, and no alternative has even been proposed.
There are two solutions on the table: IPv6 and IPv4 with carrier grade NAT.
It's going to be one of those things, in two years.
Does that imply there was a contract between you and Verizon? If so you should pursue them for breach.
I don't think the Telcos are finished punishing us for de-regulation yet. They want us to cry for Ma Bell, and then when the rates go through the roof, we might be forgiven.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Maybe AT&T is better; I just came off a two year contract at Verizon, supporting provisioning tools for your very product. For years the big push at Verizon has been to off-shore. I'm not sure they really understand Data they way they run "worldcom/MCI".
If it was my money, I would try AT&T, they are way bigger (I hear) than Verizon in the Data arena.
I think IPv6 is going to end up as another VCD (Video CD).
It's gonna be HUGE in Asia (for a time) while being ignored by the rest of the world?
"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron, and one that has already been rejected by the real world.
Fail. Looks like Slashdot doesn't provide complete IPv6 either.
What's wrong with IPv6 exactly?
I've been running dual stack on test servers just because and it seems to work fine. I've tested Windows Server 2008 and Vista clients with IPv6 and it works fine. I even get IPv6 connections to some internet servers like Mozilla.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.
They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it.
That's because 28% of it is 4chan and the other 1% is unaccounted-for dark matter.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?
Well call me Captain Obvious, but I'd say don't subscribe to Verizon. If enough people want it, eventually either Verizon will offer it or they'll go out of business. Either way it's a win for consumers.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Right, and they have been saying two years for about 12 years now. Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This is on an OC-12. They're filtering using BGP prefix lists.
this is my sig
Except China. The latest figure I've heard is six levels of NAT in some places.
Server's overloaded. I didn't expect me complaining about Verizon would hit the front page. Trying to convert it to a static page.
this is my sig
if the reason that the big boys don't want to go to IPv6 is that they stand to lose an additional money maker. They can charge for publicly available IP addresses with IPv4. In IPv6, every address would be public. This might explain carrier reluctance to make the change. It gives them one less way to nickle and dime the consumer.
Slashdot is a proper American site and refuses to surrender to new-fangled hippie bullshit like Unicode and IPv6. If ASCII and IPv4 was good enough for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, it is good enough for us!
The abundant usage of Javascript and AJAX may suggest differently, but after any amount of actually using the site, you'll see it's really a undercover op to make people long for the simple functionality of the pre-Web-2.0 days.
[citation needed]
In 2003, RIPE NCC noted that estimates fell around 2012. I will grant you that 2003 is not 12 years ago, only 6, but that was a result on the first page of google for "IPv4 run-out estimates over time."
I'm unfamiliar with oil reserves and cold fusion research, but I'd like to see your justifications for those claims, too :-)
-Aggressive purchase/selloff of unused IP space (there are companies with class As that come no where near 16.7 million systems).
-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream
In other words, the world is so IPv6 averse that the IP exhaustion will not really happen in the medium-term future. While it is sad, the fact that 95% of the internet does not care or know about having a globally unique IP address will keep NAT a viable solution for a while. I.e. just as some people pay extra for a single static IP address, in the next few years, expect to have to pay a premium for a single real IP for others to reach you at.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Thanks to China's Carrier-grade NAT you aren't seeing levels seven through 1,345,751,000. In China OLPC means One Level of network address translation Per Citizen.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I know I'm only seeing a small piece of the diagnostics here, but it's my understanding that they are correct that Verizon's end-user network should act as a stub as far as end-user traffic is concerned. If the problem is that they won't route traffic from your address (inside Verizon's /32) to another direct-allocation network that is in fact a legitimate BGP peer for IPv6 services, I'd complain to ARIN directly that their traffic is being dropped.
IPv4 is a measurable finite resource. There are 2^32 of them. You can plot it on a graph fairly accurately.
Predicting the end of IPv4 addresses is like predicting the end of any other measurable, finite resource:
As we get near the end, if there is demand there will be rationing or an increase in price to drive demand down. Either way, the supply will last longer than a naive prediction would indicate.
IPv4 NAT has already reduced the rate of exhaustion beyond what it would be without it, albeit at the price of reduced inter-connectivity.
If IPv6 isn't rolled out nearly globally soon, I think you'll see a lot more carriers handing out NAT'd addresses for new customers unless those customers are willing to pay extra for a world-visible address. Within a year after that they'll jack up the prices on existing customers who don't "downgrade" to the cheaper NAT'd plan. This will buy more time, but, again, at the cost of decreased connectivity.
Of course, I could be wrong, there could be something new and easier to implement coming down the pike, in which case all bets are off.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm not sure what the rules are on reselling IP-addresses (is it up to the individual IPv4 registries?), but even finite resources never truly run out, they just get more expensive over time (see Hotelling's rule). With a liquid-enough market in IP addresses, it get's even better (Hotelling's rule assumes the resource is used up, like oil, not reusable, like IP addresses). As the price of IP addresses goes up, more and more work will be put into NAT or similar workarounds (like how HTTP 1.1 introduced the host header), as those efforts will suddenly become cost effective. People who really need raw IP addresses will always be able to get them, just for a price. It is kinda similar to oil in that plotting current trends is always going to be misleading, as that will overlook the effect of future innovations. I actually like IPv6. I just highly doubt the dire predictions about what will happen to IPv4 734 days fraom now.
therefore, ipv6 is bad for Verizon?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.
Sorry, but I'm very cynical on this. Few businesses are "forward looking"; most look back to the heyday when life was good and want nothing to do with any new invention if they can help it. Look at the entertainment industry, the paper press industry, the telecom industry... They've all been fighting new tech for years.
Heck, if it was up to AT&T we'd all be dialing on our Princess Phones.
The boy who cried wolf might have turned out differently if the boy were able to predict the approximate future date at which the wolf would come, and periodically reminded people that the date was getting closer.
It's hard to tell from the summary, but did you sign a contract with them back in May that included IPv6 support? If yes, and they spent six months building out the line only to tell you in the end, "oh, sorry, we don't want to do IPv6 anymore" then you can get them in court for material change of contract. If there was no contract (hard to believe if there was a 6-month build-out), or if it never specified IPv6 anywhere, then you're hosed and pretty much get what you deserve for taking Verizon's word at face value. :)
First and perhaps foremost, a lot of the industry has formulated a non-trivial amount of their business plan around the artificial scarcity of IPv4. It is recommended that even residences get /48 prefixes, though some have asked that to be reduced to /56, giving every person up to 255 subnets to route, each subnet being able to host 18 quintillion hosts in a globally unique fashion. Giving a singe IP address just won't cut it since no one has bothered to do NATing on IPv6.
Secondly, no sanctioned way exists for an IPv6 only 'client' to communicate with an IPv4 'server'. I know that the engineers of IPv6 have a pure vision of a peer to peer internet where NAT is evil, but they needed to embrace it to get a very bad problem addressed. If it were baked in, then ISPs would suddenly have an incentive to migrate. As it stands, IPv6 represents only a financial burden, since it requires investment *and* they can't cut off IPv4 due to lack of interoperability. With this, suddenly, the still valuable IPv4 space wouldn't need to be given out to end customers, and IPv6 could carry them through.
One alternative would be for ISPs to start giving out private IPv4 addresses and doing the NATing for IPv4 that way, then assigning IPv6 networks for usage more in the spirit of symmetric peers. However, ISPs aren't particularly incentivized to go beyond the first step of taking away globaly IPv4 addresses. This comes to a third reason, we can still game the system with ISP level NAT a lot more since a vast majority of IP addresses in use are used by people who wouldn't even know they were behind an external NAT gateway if it happened to them one day. Most every modern internet usage is designed to tolerate NATs. Torrent and friends are more impacted than others, but most people still use http for 99% of their internet experience, and do not serve at all.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Reselling IP addresses is exceedingly difficult unless you do it under the table.
Strictly speaking, it's explicitly not allowed in most regions.
Not sure about him but I was told 2050 for oil reserves 15 years ago. Not ten years. Cold fusion research is random about every 10 years a major break through happens with a media saying that we will have it in another 10 years.
Of course listening to the media is like listening to fox news. you don't get anything useful if your an open minded intelligent person. the rhetoric and misdirection is just too much.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm assuming you don't have much experience in the real world. I am an architect on a fairly large network. 100,000 active unique DHCP's per day. We use PAT EXTENSIVELY. Unless you have a very specific reason to have a real world external IP, you don't get one. And very few people get externals. We usually give 1:1 NAT's before externals.
I assume he refers to the ability to realistically have more than one public address in your house, whether it be static or dynamic in nature. I personally have one public IPv4 address and maybe half a dozen devices to share it.
And to extend on his point, I will bet in the next year or so ISPs will start issuing addresses to residences that are in a private subnet range and charge people extra for not being behind a NAT gateway (if they haven't already).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm getting rather sick of reading posts along the lines of "it doesn't work," "it'll never work," and "you need to have one work for the other." In 2006-2007, I tried deploying an IPv4-based TINC setup on my office computers. However, to maintain this, you needed a computer at each of the bigger sites, and smaller systems tied to a common system: I had over 100 nodes chained together like this. By summer 2007, it was unsustainable: I had already been researching IPv6, and decided to start implementing it as a solution for accessing things like Intranet, VNC, and remote file systems. By the end of 2007, I had more or less eliminated the IPv4 chains with a setup of our sites using NAT'd IPv4 in the 192.168-whatever range, and individual IPv6 subnets for each site, tied together by an ethernet-based TINC install on OpenWRT routers. It has worked above and beyond my expectations: we can use regular Internet; we can use IPv6 global and internal resources. If it doesn't support v6 out of the box, chances are it works with "portproxy" fine. With a transition to newer Linux systems and Vista/2008 Windows systems, it becomes more streamlined. You can't avoid v6: its all around you. I believe in it and I've made it work.
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
The service they promise (sort of)... but they're being *******'es about it. If I understand correctly they provide article author two options (1) Use Verizon IP addresses, or (2) Use their ARIN assignment and peer with Verizon AS 701.
Where Verizon blocks announcements of prefixes longer than /32.
This is a long-standing (braindead) policy on Verizon's part, that doesn't even account for the fact that RIRs are handing out /48 PI assignments in some cases, and there can be multi-homed sites with /56s.
In other words, a third of the V6 internet. You can think of this as the IPv4 equivallent of only accepting announcement of a /19 or larger block of IP addresses.
Verizon isn't well known for having complete IPv6 connectivity, a lot of "IPv6 providers" don't. If you are serious about V6 connectivity, you definitely want to get multiple providers.
In the V6 world, connectivity is sparse, and filtering is overly aggressive from the likes of Verizon and other big V4 players, almost as if they're not really all that serious about ensuring global V6 reachability. I would say 2 or 3 transit providers is needed for bare minimum connectivity. And naturally it's better if you can peer with others...
Relying on the sun is a pretty long term solution. If we're still using the sun for energy when the sun is about to expand and burn the planet, we have bigger problems than just energy...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I'm afraid that while IPv6 has many features, the upstream roll-out is hindered by necessary hardware and configuration upgrades, and interoperability with IPv4 for at least another decade. And frankly, with the effective use of NAT and staggered layers of NAT around the world, the overwhelming need of IPv6 has also evaporated for another decade.
Can you show me a single feature of IPv6 that Verizon's customers actually need? One that isn't also manageable with NAT and reasonably intelligent load balancers?
You know, that "sky is falling" prediction has been coming and going for years now. It's always just a couple years away. Things get reallocated, and then it's "oh a couple years away". Someone always "discovers" IPv6, because they were just taught about it and suddenly it's the most important thing to them since storing rations for Y2K.
Sept 1998 ... IPv4's 4.2 billion addresses will run out in about 10 years-by 2010 at the latest.
In many ways, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 marks the period of the Internet's adolescence. Within the user community, there's angst over
July 1999 - Wired
The Internet on Thursday began moving from its old addressing system to a radically new one, though no one is likely to notice.
After four years of testing, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority on Thursday rolled out Version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6), the next-generation numeric addressing system for the global network.
March 2002, screen digest
Under present conditions, Internet protocol (IP) addresses will run out by 2005, according to report by European Commission. Old IP version four (IPv4) cannot provide each person around the world with one address, especially since greater proportion of addresses have been assigned to North America.
May 2007, internetnews.com
The IPv4 Address Report lists two possible dates for when the number of IPv4 dates will run out: April 17, 2010 or December 2, 2010, depending on the source.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Still, those ISPs can start offering cheaper plans to those willing to take a NAT'd IP address (read: charging more if you want a raw IP. This is already happening in the commercial space). The logic still works. Those who really need IP addresses will be able to pay to get them. And those who don't will work with improved NAT and related technologies.
In 734 days, you will be able to get an IPv4 address if you really want one. Still, as I said, I like IPv6. Who wants to pay a premium when the "scarcity" is artificially created by a limited number of bits?
It's a bit like suggesting you can sell parts of your land (real-estate) under the table, without notifying the county records office of the sale..
The problem is... there's a registered owner (or deed holder). And having someone tell you that you can use some IP addresses is useless unless you can get traffic to them.
The action required to get traffic to go to an IP address is very public, you have to announce the IP address space using an AS number.
The only way for you to do it without setting off alarm bells is to pretend that you ARE the person you "bought" the IPs from under the table, using their AS number.
Your announcement will probably be filtered, since your IP block is a portion of theirs (it's smaller than the assignment)
So the traffic goes to them... unless they happen to be an ISP connected to you, you are now in a sticky situation.
So the difficulty in simply 'acquiring IPs' under the table, is the need to get connectivity to them. Controlling that connectivity is harder, and if the company that sold you the IPs goes bankrupt, you're screwed.
You're better off just getting your ISP to allocate you the IPs. Either that... or buying/merging with other companies for the sole purpose of acquiring their IP addresses, and throwing away all else.
(Depending on how scarce IPs get)
Actually, if the hierarchy really is that deep it would sure make filtering out bad sites damned easy. Since only the top level routers can see outside, only one door to lock.
It has been rejected by the customers. That means essentially jack.
ISPs will implement it and offer their customers the choice of a NATed solution or real IP for premium price. Expect to pay more for your IP address in the future, they can charge for it, so they will. You don't like it, try finding an ISP that offers you one for free. You won't find one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know it is a bummer but ARIN should not have issued PI addresses. Verizon is simply taking a stand on this issue. It's like blaming AT&T for not having DNS entries from OpenDNS. It's not AT&T's job to continuously keep up to snuff on every Tom, Dick, and Harry who puts up a DNS server or make's an independent entry. Likewise, it's not Verizon's job to get BGP information from independent routes. Yeah' it sucks big time and Verizon should be shunned for it, but really do you blame them? 2620:0/23 is a black hole on a lot of ISP's, why is Verizon special?
In this case, freely allowing the purchase and sale of parts of IP blocks piecemeal would be an internet routing table disaster.
The routing table has already gone over 300,000 entries. Filtering is already a reality for many sites, and many ISPs, common equipment already can't handle the full routing table much longer at the current rate of expansion.
Equipment that can do better in hw is extremely expensive, and out of reach of much of the market.
Now, the registries today allocate blocks of IP addresses in a manner that allows filtering.
For example, if you get a /22 for multi-homing, that block gets allocated from a block from which only /22's are allocated. That way, everyone can filter to the /22, you advertise one /22 route, if you try to break up that /22 and advertise 4 /24 routes, for traffic engineering, you can do it, but many sites will filter it.
The same applies to organizations who get a /20 direct assignment, they can chop up their /20 into 16 /24s and also advertise each one with different values or from different places for traffic engineering, and it's common to chop that up a bit, but most sites will filter those, and only their /20 announcement is propagated.
Now, imagine if policies were different, and you got a /19 you later didn't need half it. You are supposed to return the /20 you don't need to the registry and exchange keep only the smaller block if this happens.
But imagine you didn't... you sold 16 /24s (256 IPs each) to 16 different entities.
Now they each want to announce them (they're not connected to you)... that's 16 more entries in the routing table.
Ok, that matters but is not massive.
What is HUGE is the fact that when people apply their filtering rules (accepting only /20 or larger) advertisements from your block allocated from a block from which only /20s are allocated.....
Suddenly those networks you 'sold' those blocks to aren't reachable by networks in the DFZ that do this filtering.
And they'll be complaining to them, demanding they relax their filtering, which ultimately causes costs to be massively increased for everyone, or their equipment blows up, or they tell the people you sold IPs to to go get a proper block... in any case, the result is bad for the community
Even though you benefit from selling IPs, and they benefit from being able to get them from you, the community as a whole incurs a massive expense, it's basically an abuse of the commons.
From the article it's not clear if Verizon is actively blackholing those prefixes, filtering them from their peers, or if they lack transit to the ASes from which the prefixes come.
I find it hard to believe that even Verizon is so disorganized that they would blackhole or filter that large a chunk of IPv6-land. My guess is that the situation is that not all of the Tier 1s have their IPv6 peering agreements in place yet. As we've learned from the various "depeering" events over the years, if a Tier 1 isn't hearing another Tier 1's route from that AS, they're not going to get it from their other peers, because that would cause the other peers to act like transit providers, and Tier 1s really don't like providing transit for eachother.
In other words, traffic for those prefixes probably doesn't leave 701 because 701 doesn't know where to send it.
The way the Internet is built it's not possible for any network to guarantee transit between you and a specific AS or prefix. There are so many factors external to a provider's network that could cause them to not know the route, or other issues that I don't even want to try to list 'em all. Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements.
I can't believe I'm coming to Verizon's defense here...
I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.
Let's see. You pick up your marbles from the big bad company, and nobody else leaves with you. So... your answer is to try and impose your will on everyone else. Maybe all those other people simply didn't care about the same issue as you. Like, maybe your opinion doesn't matter.
This is my sig.
That would explain the fucked up routing issues I've dealt with in Shanghai.
Six levels of NAT?? That's really bad!
Life is not for the lazy.
The run out date for the RIR IP address pools has not been continuously changing to 'about to run out'. It changed exactly once, due to the adoption of a new technology and an entirely new addressing scheme (CIDR).
The 2011 run-out date was forecast by the folks who compiled the IPv4 address report work back in 2005, and the expected year of run-out has not changed. In fact, so far the model and the predictions have shown to be fairly accurate.
There has not been inconsistency or divergence between the reports and reality.
The reports are certainly more compelling than an anecdotal claim that "We've been 'about to run out' of IPV4 addresses for over 10 years."
It's being implemented by 2 tier 1 carriers in the US that I know of. Though it's not really going to be geared towards computers. It's all more or less smartphones and other non PC end devices.
Some ISP's will just do the IPV4-6 conversion in your modem and everything at the home will be IPV4. I'm sure for 99% of the people out there it will be fine. The rest of us are going to be pulling their hair out.
There is no requirement for handling the entire IPv4 routing table on edge devices. If you're a small network using BGP you ignore the internet and just advertise default routes OUT of your network. If you're a big network, MPLS + BGP free core is the way to go. In general vacating traffic to the nearest edge connection (when cost is not a factor) is the best policy.
Where cost comes into play there are numerous ways around carrying the routing tables again. The only reason you would carry full tables is if you provide BGP connectivity to your downstream customers. In that case you segment that portion of the network and provide for it in a small controlled manner to avoid unnecessary complexity of your "dumb" network.
So your proof that IPv4 address exhaustion isn't going to happen is to provide a bunch of sources that say (except the EC) that it is going to happen next year and current predictions are that it will be 2 years from now. Only a year off in trying to predict something 10 years in the future sounds like pretty good accuracy to me.
OverLoad of acronyms Per Comments, I think
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
IPv6 was designed to solve not just one problem, but two. Not just address exhaustion, but also routing table explosion.
But it created a problem: no multihoming. I'm not just a Verizon customer: I'm a Sprint customer, I'm a SAVVIS customer. How would it be efficient to only be able to route via Verizon (especially if it were down)?
this is my sig
For those interested:
Neighbor V AS MsgRcvd MsgSent TblVer InQ OutQ Up/Down State/PfxRcd
2600:80A:60F::1 4 701 18685 7401 44868 0 0 1d09h 1516
2620:0:950::242:130
4 11170 28462 14090 44869 0 0 1d00h 2140
Verizon carries 1516 routes, the combination of Sprint and HE are 2140 routes.
this is my sig
The least bad solution with the current standards is to give to each IPv6 multiple addresses, e.g. one with the Verizon prefix, one with the Sprint prefix, one with SAVVIS. Of course, that solution assumes that the exit routers are capable of choosing the exit route based on the source address picked by the host, which is a *big* assumption. I suppose that if there is enough demand, Cisco, Juniper et al will come up with such routers.
If that works, you get the equivalent of each host having multiple "virtual network cards", one for each provider. Of course, they do not in fact have multiple cards, just multiple addresses.
Failing that, the big organizations will pay their providers large sums and get a short prefix (/32, probably) that will be routed. The small folks will be left hanging.
IPv4 dates back to 1981. At the time, I'm sure handing out Class A's did not seem such a bad idea. Noone at the time expected IPv4 to be the be all end all of network addressing, they expected it to be used for awhile and then replaced by something else. Back in 1980, did you think there would be a personal computer (or several) on every desk and in every home, all connected to a global internet tying every on of them together? This is a good 10 years before most people ever heard of the "Information superhighway". The people participating and building the network, getting it off the ground, got large chunks of addresses to use as they saw fit. That sounds fair to me. Is it fair for people to wait until others made a massive investment in the network, and after it becomes wildly successful, to then demand they byproduct of their investment?
Noone could have expected IPv4 would achieve the status it has today, noone predicted address scarcity being a problem before a better protocol could be designed and implemented. Presumably the designers, being intelligent, reasonable men, expected other intelligent, reasonable men to follow them, capable of implementing upgrades to add new address space as the demand required and the technology was available. Unfortunately the internet devolved into being led by squabbling, political maneuvering, corrupt fuckheads. I don't think it's fair to blame the original designers for that.
"Better politely and PLEASENTLY letting them know that there's a problem."
Visiting in person and spitting the dummy can be deeply satisfying...
I came back to a busy mobile phone store for the fourth time regarding enabling a AU-$30 sim chip, I had also had several lengthy conversations with the phone company over that time. I went through the story (again) with a disinterested "manager" who said it was the phone companies fault, however I used to work for the telco so at this point I knew he was making excuses to brush me off and get back to earning comissions from the 30-40 people milling round the store. I had also just been watching him successfully use the same routine on the woman he served before me.
My blood started simmering but I kept a lid on it and said I no longer cared who's fault it was I just wanted my money back, he replied that the phone company had my money, I said (with a raised voice) "I don't care about the fucking phone company, I gave the money to you". He forcefully refused again claiming he no longer had the money. I replied with some loud random abuse and then picked up a display box of leaflets from the counter and threw them in the air along with the sim chip and paperwork. The "manger" was now tripping over a printer trying to back away into his office - I am at heart a "gental giant", realising I had already scared the shit out of the guy I calmed down.
I quietly turned around to leave and to my surprised delight the previously packed shop was now completely deserted, even his staff had run off! Most memorable $30 I ever spent, my kids still rib me about it 10yrs after the fact.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.