for any inconvenience this may have caused you…have a great (insert appropriate time of day!) And thank you for calling Comcast.

I have been in internet service provider hell for the last week and intermittently over the past two months. My service keeps slowing to a crawl, flaking out then quitting. I have not been able to get online at home in 3 days. Which is better, I suppose, than the total of 10 days that I didn’t have service last month. I have the cable company’s number in my phone and have memorized the numbers to by-pass the service menu to get to a “technician.” (1-1-1-3). I speak to a different technician every time of course and it typically goes something like this. I get the “we do apologize” thing then they ask me to shut off my modem and “reboot my PC.” Then we start with the rounds of the “technician” telling me that getting the Comcast Technician screen when I open a browser “isn’t good.” It was determined that my brand-new router is broken and I will have to call Motorola because there’s nothing that Comcast can do. The Motorola guy looked at the router and proclaimed that Comcast is a big idiot and at this point I couldn’t agree more. I let it go for another day because I’m off work right now and am trying to avoid being aggravated. I still had this Comcast screen yesterday so I called again. The “technician” who seemed more clueless and freaked out than the previous one, said that a special department would have to “reactivate” my modem and it would take 24 hours. I’m sure it doesn’t take a whole day to click a button, but I let it go. I still didn’t have service this morning! I called again early this morning…and spoke to a Real Technician named Barbara. She clicked something and it is now working. I am switching to DSL next week and, providing cable doesn’t break again, I am going to run them side by side to compare the speed and quality. I will report back. In the meantime, I would suggest staying away from Comcast and if you do have to call for help, do it in the early morning. I’m thinking their intelligence decreases exponentially as the day wears on.