May 2004 Outage

So the story, in brief, goes like this:

0.  Never being one to use my bankcard for online transactions, I nonetheless do so in order to buy a funny, silly shirt.
1. Shortly thereafter, there is an online fraud attempt by some weird German company trying to gank cash from my bankcard.  It was cool, though, and I found the whole thing kinda amusing, 'cause the bank caught it instantly and laid waste to the whole attempt.
2. Bankcard cancelled, new one ordered
3. ATM card arrives instead
4. Bankcard ordered again
5. Bankcard never arrives, yet another one ordered. Whether this was a bank screwup or my Nazi postman is unknown.  (The dude once knocked on my door in order to glare at me and interrogate me as to why I'd not checked my mail for a couple of days.  I am a Mailbox Sinner in his eyes, incapable of redemption.  The fact that I might not wish to clean the 40 tons of junkmail he puts in there per day every day (while real mail I am sent is always conspicuously absent) evidently never crossed his Nazi mind.)
6. Somewhere in here, my webhosts attempt to autodraft my old cancelled bankcard . . . I'd forgotten that was being used for ST-v-SW.   I avoid credit cards like the plague, so this bankcard was the only choice.
7. Instead of following their policy, the webhosts do not bother attempting to contact me about the billing issue, and instead kaboom, site down.   How late was the payment, you're wondering?   Six days.   Don't waste much time, do they?
8. Bankcard still hasn't arrived.
9. Call and raise hell with bank, end up escalating to some 15th level manager who still won't give me the cardnumbers over the phone even though I can recite my genetic code to her.  I can understand that, but it's damned inconvenient.
10. Bankcard still hasn't arrived.
11. Impatience continues.   I finally call the bank again and raise additional hell.  They finally create yet another card for me, and promise to overnight it with a shipping company at no cost to me.
12. No card the next day.  "Okay," I think, "maybe it got sent out too late.  It'll come tomorrow."
13. No card the next day.  (twitch)
14. On the third day, the card arrives.   Frankly, at this point, I was shocked that it had actually arrived.   I'd come to wonder whether there was some Treknobabble anomaly at a post office somewhere between my bank and I that was swallowing the cards into its subspace vortex doohickey.
15.  I update the card info with the webhosts.
16.  Nothing happens that day, or the next.
17.  I e-mail the webhosts, trying to figure out what new form of wankery has appeared in this comedy of errors.
18.  The webhosts e-mail me back, claiming the card is invalid.
19.  I doublecheck my entry into the host's system, and it's good.  I call the bank, confirming the card's validity and the fact that no one's tried to do squat with it.
20.  I e-mail the hosts once again, suggesting nicely that they bring an end to their wankery.
21.  The site comes back up.  Seems they (gasp!) actually had the right info all along.

And yea, verily, so it was that a desire for a silly T-shirt slowly but surely developed into a War Against the Tards.   My site was a casualty for a time, but at long last the war is won.