time warner sucks

here we go again. we fully quit these jokers over a year ago, after paying for what was, on their part, clearly a breach of contract.

like many households, we ditched our landline in favor of cell phones more than two years ago. for internet, that left all isp's like the phone company, dsl, etc. out of the picture. "maybe cable could work," we thought. so we opted for the only gun in town: time warner.

that's how they became our internet service provider. the end of that run is not so pretty.

i had, so i thought, set us up with wi-fi with a decent router for my wife's pc desktop. i have a pismo with an airport card. everything was peachy for about eight months, though i could most often only get a signal in the front portion of the house. then i remembered savvy sages saying the higher the access point, the better the reception for everyone. so up, up, up went the pc to the third floor. from then on the signal of our router was indeed strong, but for some reason, the cable just wouldn't stay connected. we had to call time warner multiple times to come fix it. the hapless, worn technicians would try a dizzying number of solutions. the last of which almost always got us up and running a day or two more. the last three months, we got maybe a week of service: total. they then bullied me into paying for service not rendered.

so we were done with time warner.

as long as i camped in the front room, my pismo, which has next to no battery life left, was able to pick up a pretty good signal from friendly neighbors. because of a recent reshuffling, i no longer go in that room, so my connection is, again, shotty at best.

i thought, "cantenna to the rescue," but never could figure out how to make that work for either the internal wi-fi card in my powerbook or the cardless, but routered pc.

so we're back in the hands of a bumbling monopoly. same incompetence, terrible equipment and worried workers (man, they must treat their employees/contractors like dirt). nothing's changed, except maybe the time it took me to smell something afoul. barely minutes in, and already i want out.