6 months

The following event is happening to me now. There is a certain business Internet service provider in Toronto whose sales guy signed me up on an agreed network speed, whose installation technician, upon arrival at our site, made a judgment that they could never provide service at said speed and aborted the install, who sent us a bill 30 days later for service never rendered, which thus far has taken me 6 months to fight for a refund. I’m stuck with a jaded feeling as I sit here now preparing to fax back a copy of the receipt proving to them that I did indeed return their modem. This internet provider uses a third party to process equipment returns.

The following event happened to me a couple of years ago. There is a certain home building materials vendor in Toronto, who uses a third party for their credit provisioning, who miscalculated my returns on their monthly statement, which took 6 months for me to successfully dispute the discrepancies.

A couple of conspiracy theories is now bubbling in my head.

XmlSerializer and the "Specified" suffix

It took me 3 hours to figure out why XmlSerializer wasn’t writing out a particular class property. This is why:

…if a serializable Field/Property has a corresponding field of type Boolean having as a name the Field/Property name with "Specified" suffix, the XmlSerializer conditionally exclude that Field/Property from the serialization process.