Where I live I don't have many options for cable and internet. I currently have Comcast digital cable and high speed internet. My only other alternative is Verizon DSL and a satellite dish. I have been a Comcast customer for years. They happened to be my cable and internet provider at my last couple of residences. I never really had a major problem with them until I moved to West Virginia.

My understanding is Comcast bought out the local cable company in Berkeley County a few years ago and have been having growing pains. Understandable I guess but it is still annoying. The past couple of weekends every time I try and order a movie from the OnDemand service I get greeted with an error message that states:

System Unavailable. Please try again in 5 minutes

This would be acceptable if it worked five minutes later but it doesn't. I'll call them and they will "send a signal" to my cable box which I have ascertained does absolutely nothing. This past weekend it did this again and when I called the customer service agent told me there was a problem with the system. I can deal with that. Last night though, I was watching the Bears on Monday Night Football and in the first few minutes of the fourth quarter my picture goes out. I am a bit peeved since the Bears were playing good football for once this season. So I figure the station is having issues so I try to go online to maybe catch a live radio stream from the Bears website. No internet connection. Now I am pissed. I decide to let it go and go to bed, it was late and I have to wake up early.

So I get up this morning to find I still have no cable or internet. I call them bright and early this morning to learn my county has an outage and should be restored by 9AM. My wife just called and still no service.

Any time we have issues with the cable or internet I get pissed and it generally ruins my day. My wife finds this funny and doesn't understand why I get so mad. The reason I get mad is I pay a pretty high monthly fee for a service and I expect that service to work when I need it to. I understand there will be occasional outages for whatever reason but we are going on two weekends where I couldn't rent a movie and now I am dealing with an outage on both my cable and internet. This infuriates me. My only option is to shitcan Comcast and switch to Verizon but I like the speeds I get with Comcast and I don't want a dish attached to my house that will probably have a shitty reception whenever it rains or snows. My only hope that I cling to is Verizon will eventually get around to installing Fios in the area. Once they do I will switch in a heartbeat. I have heard nothing but great things about the Fios service.

All I want is my stuff to work that I pay money for. That is it, not too much to ask for or maybe it is, who knows?