Everyone knows cable companies suck. Adelphia reminds me of this on a regular basis. I have had so many problems with them that I have them on speeddial. Outages area a weekly matter, reception is snowy and customer service is the worst of the four or five different cable companies I have had the misfortune to be a customer of.

So why do I stick with Adelphia? Oh that's right, they have a monopoly on both cable and high-speed service in my neighborhood. I can't wait until I don't have to deal with them anymore. For those of you who don't know the founders of Adelphia embezzled from the stock holders and were arrested sending the company into bankruptcy. You may have heard of the "partnership" with Time Warner and Comcast? The non-PR term for this is buying up the scraps that the dog wouldn't eat.

I live in one of the neighborhoods that Comcast picked up on the cheap. I was looking forward to what I figured must be an improvement in service. I was wrong. For starters I didn't receive a bill for 2 months, calling them to pay takes over 30 minutes and comes with an extra fee and they disabled their billpay website. Now normally I don't mind not getting a bill, but I don't want to have to shell out $300 plus late fees at once when they get their act together.

The real kicker is that the customer service hasn't changed any it seems. I just got over a bad cold and I had a busy day of internet surfing, online gaming and listening to blogtalk radio (online only) scheduled for last night to make up for all I missed when lying in bed sick. And don't let me forget that the wife has an important paper she was in the middle of researching online and must be submitted today, again, online. So with our evenings revolving around the internet the way they do so often I should not have been surprised when I saw "Server not found". *Scream* I checked everything to make sure that the problem was not on my end and then called Adelphia. "Expected hold time is greater than 30 minutes," the recorded message sounds in my ear. *scream*

Long story short the girl at tech support had never heard of a cable modem and wireless router in one. Now this isn't the most common device, but with millions sold each year you would think that tech support would know what it was. After telling her over and over the trouble shooting I had already done and which lights on the modem were on I was put on hold for "just a minute". Ten minutes later she gets back on to tell me her supervisor is trying to help her and I need to hold for a bit longer. After another nap, yes I took several naps I was on hold so long, she finally returned to tell me I was experiencing a scheduled outage.

I wasted an hour of my time to be told that my neighborhood had a scheduled two day outage. Now normally for a scheduled outage the automated system will inform you when you call in. In addition normally the tech support will know about the outage and not spend 25+ minutes troubleshooting. Normally, for an extended outage customers will be notified in advance. Nope, not when Adelphia & Comcast are now "Partners". And I do blame Comcast equally in this; after all the outage was to "setting your neighborhood up on Comcast's network".

All is not lost though. The wife says that she can connect intermittently this morning and managed to finish her research. If she is lucky she will even be able to submit the finished paper. And it must be an off week at work with the intermittent MySpace blocking so I can actually access it from there. Though the downside is that the decision has been made to return to dial-up. I hear rumors about people gaming online with dial-up from time to time and soon I'll know if they are true. But only having one computer online at a time? How barbaric is that?