Blogging was light yesterday afternoon owing to a lengthy meeting and then the general exigencies of life. Indeed, Friday has been a bad day for blogging for me for a variety of reasons since the start of the Spring Semester.
However, the main cause of my silence since at least 7pm central time on Friday has been the lack of an internet connection at my house. Which, to put it mildly, annoyed the freakin’ heck out of me for the entire time it was out. I feel semi-blind without my ‘net connection. No e-mail! No instant news! No blogging! Aaarrgh!
Plus, I hate having to call customer “service”-since there is no local Charter customer service office in Montgomery, I have to call an 800 number, which I think tkes me to a regional office in Birmingham. First I have to wait through the initial onslaught of commercials, bad music, and being told that both “we are experiencing unusually high caller volume” and that “my call is important to us”—to which I respond: a) when is caller volume not high? 3am? and, b) “yeah, right”. Indeed, it would probably make an amusing late night talk show comedy bit to record what people say back to the recordings (although I suspect much of it wouldn’t be fit to air on broadcast tv).
Let’s face facts: one is already pissed off that one doesn’t have one’s cable or internet—having to sit through insipid recordings about how much they care about you doesn’t improve one’s mood.
And the most frustrating part is that with Charter, it is a two-step process. First one is one is one hold to get to the gatekeeper who takes your info and then, because you have an internet problem, forwards you on to the tech people. And then one goes back into on-hold hell for at least another 15 minutes.
My favorite part about being on line for tech help is all the hints they give about where I can find help online, which is the kind of advice that can drive an internet-junkie insane when he is on hold because he can’t connect to the internet!
And one last monumental pet-peeve: why, why why do they make me input my number on the keypad of the phone only to have the first question they ask me be “What is your phone number?” The credit card people do the same thing. It is as if they want their callers to go postal on the phone.
The whole thing is enough to consider DSL and DirectTV.
Plus, I know Knology is in town: I wonder if they service my neighborhood…
Posted by Steven Taylor at February 7, 2026 02:59 PM | TrackBackAll quite annoying to be sure. I had outages myself yesterday but, thankfully, it's a two man shop with excellent personal support.
DSL is slow compared to cable, although not bad.
I've never tried the DirectTV internet access, but they're clearly set up as a broadband-of-last-resort service: They're outrageously expensive.
Posted by: James Joyner at February 7, 2026 04:14 PMDirectTV (with TiVo) is God's personal gift to television.
All that hype about losing a signal in bad weather was written for the cable companies by the same people who wrote the line about Gore winning florida for the Democrats.
We have had sheeting rain so thick I could not see 50 feet and it has worked fine.
As far as DSL and related service goes, I can not say enough good things about www.speakeasy.net
Their phone support is outstanding.
If I open a trouble ticket and it is not closed within 24 hours they call my cell phone to make sure it was resolved. If they have anything important (like an IP change) about to happen they mail me AND call my cell phone. Ya can't beat that.
I have (not 1, not 2 but..) 3 internet connections to my house so I have a fair amount of experience. Further I have probably a dozen customers that have switched from (crappy) bellsouth to speakeasy and all have been pleased.
It is worth the grief of the change just for the TiVo.
Posted by: Paul at February 7, 2026 05:14 PMI had problems with Charter here in SC a few months ago. I called their call center for this part of the country (which is 30 mins away from here) and got the standard powercycle the modem response. I discovered other bloggers and readers of my blog were having problems that night in Greenville also and that it happened consistently at a set time. The people in the call center transferred me to Network Ops since the power cycle didnt work... however I got a busy signal and no way to exit back to the first line call center.
After going through this a few days I had a friend give me contact info for the Charter CEO in St. Louis. I had a phone call from two network techs who were local a day or two later. The local call center reacted by calling me the next week wanting to schedule a service call to fix "my" problems. When I told the appointment scheduler that I talked to the 2 network guys he kept trying to get me to schedule even though I told him there were no longer problems and that the evidence indicated it was a larger network problem.
I made several posts about it on my blog as it happened, including the CEO's contact info.
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