Have not been to Felix for coffee or lunch or dinner or anything for years! I lost my patience with the cafes along Wakefield Street some time ago when they all seemed to close so early on week nights meaning there was nothing cafe-ish in that part of town. Back in the day when I was at university Lido and City Limits (where Finc is now) used to stay open quite late and you could always get a hot chocolate and a piece of cheesecake on the way home from the movies after 10.30pm.

When Felix opened I went a few times because of the orange. Of course. Last night we had our apartment Body Corporate AGM on Cuba Street and decided that we’d give Finc a go for a quick, light cafe meal, but they were closed. Sigh. So Felix it was. The orange teddy bear light is still there and the orange roof

I had a bowl of minestrone with toasted ciabatta and The Mister had a burger. Both were excellent. It was a bit chilly in there, I could only see one heater, and as inviting as the bench seat long the windows or high stools around a communal table looked, they were just too cold to sit at being so close to the windows. So we sat at the back at the bar. Which was OK, we like sitting at the bar, except there were no foot rests on the stools or the bar and even The Mister’s feet didn’t touch the ground so you can imagine how high up in the air my feet were swinging! Wasn’t particularly comfortable but as we were there for a quick meal, it was over pretty quickly.

We might add it to the list of options for dinner on the way home when it gets a bit warmer.

No I’m not talking about my life on an island sipping cocktails while enjoying a view of the endless blue ocean lapping at white sands bordered by palm trees, I’m talking about Paradise dot net dot NZ.

Received a call out of the blue this morning asking what my decision was in light of Paradise being ‘retired’ by TelstraClear … hmmm … I was supposed to be making a decision? Seems I’d missed an email about it … ironic really. Anyway, the offer was on the table to switch to Clear (well, back to Clear in my case) and keep my existing Paradise email address, well, for an additional $2.99 per month. So I organised all that over the phone then they guy told me I had one day to forward all the email I wanted to keep to my new Clear address because once the redirect was in place for Paradise, mail would go straight to Clear and I wouldn’t have access to my old Paradise mailbox. So I spent ages doing that. And it all worked fine.

So no more Paradise webmail for me:

I know a few people at work who use it so I asked them if they were going through the same thing. Seems they weren’t and were rather alarmed that they hadn’t been told that their Paradise email address, that they’d also had for 10 years, was going to disappear. We began to worry it was a scam. So being a good Internet citizen I phoned Paradise to see if it was a scam … overlooking the fact that it’s TelstraClear who answers Paradise’s phone now, I spoke to someone who assured me that it wasn’t a scam and that the person who’d phoned me that morning was indeed a real person, and employee of TelstraClear who worked in the Auckland sales team.

So I’d been tweeting about all this as the day went along, wondering online why none of my colleagues were going through the same thing and wailing about someone else already having orangegirl@clear.net.nz as their address. Then what do you know but TelstraClear tweeted me back! We swapped a few tweets then email addresses and I got the full low-down on why it was me and no-one else who was loosing their address. Seems customers of 10+ years who were paying by credit card and didn’t use cable had some whole lower level of security that meant through lack of address, drivers licence and secret question information collected at the time of becoming a Paradise customer all those years ago meant they were getting rid of all these accounts. Seemed plausible. And I was pleased to get the personal help and to be able to put the minds of my colleagues at rest.

For everyone out there who emails me at my Paradise email address, this doesn’t change, I can give you a new Clear address if you like, but my Paradise email is going straight into my Clear inbox for the duration of my time with Clear.

Update several days later:

So, am going through all stages of loss here. First the denial/disbelief that Paradise was going, then the sadness associated with no longer logging in (although I was glad to see the back of the ugly web site used for reading my mail) and now I’m firmly in the anger stage. Someone emailed me at my Paradise address and it turns out the redirect is not working, it bounced. I have all our electronic bills going to that address and let me tell you if Genesis cut off our power through non-payment, TelstraClear will be covering all costs associated with that! And I received a ‘Welcome to TelstraClear’ pack in the mail asking for my bank account details for the monthly payment – what? I want to pay by credit card – I have a shiny new card that gets me air points so I want to pay by credit card like I have done for the last 10 years!! Although given that credit card paying customers seem to be those who lost their Paradise accounts it seems that they perhaps don’t take credit cards for payment any more, perhaps it’s too much trouble to chase around updating card expiry dates, although it never was a problem before.

So I’ve emailed the person who ‘convinced’ me to swap to Clear to tell them of my annoyance, and I returned to Twitter, although now I’ve conversed with a real person at the end of that Twitter account I feel kind of bad that the person and the company are one in the same and that they’ll think I’m mad with them. Although it happens to me all the time with the Xero account and no-one holds back their displeasure even if they do know who ‘OG’ is receiving the tweets at the other end.

Of course, it’s the weekend, and no-one is responding. Sigh.