A bit more whingeing

In the interests of keeping everyone up to speed, here's a few more obstacles we're having to get past.
When we signed the lease on our house we opted into a scheme called Direct Connect (hereafter to be referred to as DC), where one phone call from them to us was supposedly all that was required to set up our phone, internet, electricity, water, and natural gas connections. In theory its a great concept as we didn’t really have to lift a finger and it cost us nothing. However, we assumed that the person at DC would actually set up the connections correctly, and that was a poor assumption to make.
First off, internet connection. DC signed us up for ADSL broadband with one of the larger IPs in Australia. We were asked if we needed a modem and we said no, because we’d brought one over from Canada with us. Then, a couple of days a go I received a phone call from the IP to let us know that out modem would be delivered to us by the end of the week. I told her that we hadn’t ordered a modem. She seemed surprised and we argued about this for several minutes – she couldn’t comprehend that we might already have a modem, probably because broadband is still a relatively new concept in Australian residential internet. In the end she said she would cancel the order. A few minutes later I got a call from DC to say that the IP had informed them that we had refused connection of our internet service. I told DC that in fact we had not refused connection, just the modem. DC went back to the IP and explained the situation, and then called me back and said everything was sorted out. I went home and checked my credit card account online to discover a $227 payment to the IP. I called the IP and asked what the payment was for, and they said it included the cost of modem they had sent us. Exasperated, I explained the situation and was told that they would refund the cost of the modem to my credit card, which has not yet happened. And the final straw...this morning a courier arrived with a package from the IP, in which was a modem. We didn't accept it of course.

The other thing DC got wrong was that they didn’t set up our natural gas connection, despite telling us that it had been done. I discovered this when we received an overdue notice for the previous tenants’ natural gas. It appears that DC saw that our house already had a gas connection and left it at that. So we have unwittingly been using someone else’s natural gas for the last few weeks. I’m not sure we’ve actually got to the heart of the problems that could arise from this yet. I do know that I’m not paying a cent towards someone else’s bill though.