How was your morning?  Did you have a good drive into work, should you drive into work?  Have a delicious bowl of cereal and your traditional 32 oz Styrofoam cup of coffee from the gas station?  It’s cold out there, so I hope you bundled up before you left home.

Unfortunately, there’s been a problem for all of us who have website hosting through Dreamhost.  However you’re paying for your hosting, go right now and check your billing statement.  I’ll wait.

*waits for the screaming and cursing to die down*

Thanks to a major snafu on their part, Dreamhost has billed users for an entire year (December 2008) rather than last month (December 2007), slapping bills ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars into checking accounts and credit cards worldwide.  That means if you wrote that mortgage check on Friday, it might’ve bounced today.  Which means you’ll have overdraft fees, late fees for your mortgage, credit penalties, and a whole world of excrement to sort through.  I hope you enjoy making lots of telephone calls to customer service centers across the globe, because that’s your future. 

It’s almost as if the Dreamhost billing department came into your house, hopped up onto your breakfast nook, dropped trou, and deposited a steaming pile of grump into your cereal, isn’t it?  Judging from the over 460 angry responses, a lot of otherwise competent and well-behaved bill payers woke up to a bowl of Total and poop.

Image:  I Can Has Cheezburger