Three posts in one day. It's like Christmas in March (although it did snow here in March). Gentle reader, I don't know if you remember this tale of highway robbery that I told way back in November, at the start of winter. In a random act of symmetry, this tale is now coming to a close at the end of winter. In the interim period, my fine for "fare evasion" actually rose from €40 to €47 as we had not made our complaints in the alotted timeframe of a fortnight. Well, that and we hoped they would be kind and forget it all, only to be sent gruesome reminder notices. On receipt of these notices, Aaron and I scribed an email to send to the Deutsche Bahn crew to explain our situation, making special note to be extremely polite. That email was sent at the end of January, and until today, I had not received any communications from them. Today I got a letter back from them - and my fine is now reduced to €17. Now it's still AU$28.50, but it's a lot better than the AU$60 that they were trying foist on me. I'd count that as a victory of sorts. Let this be proof conclusive that the German system is malleable, and there is actually some leeway in there for people to make mistakes. Especially ticket conductors who are massive Arschloch.

Update - 23/03/06
So you might recall that I was having a few problems with my Internet connection - detailed in a prologue, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6. Part 7 of the story goes a little something like this:

I finally managed to get a technician to come out today to fix the DSL. It now works. 7 months of stuffing around with Freenet. Now I have a sweet 2Mbit connection.