Connection

I am online via a cable modem. We pay what seems to me to be an exorbitant fee each month for cable TV, DVR, and this Internet access. The online mail program that comes with RoadRunner is the crappiest thing I have ever seen. There is no address book and when I asked about it, they suggested I use a free mail program like Yahoo!

RoadRunner and Time Warner are part of the great AOL system. AOL has one of the easiest to use – read “made for newbies” – mail programs around. You would think, but you would be wrong, that AOL could whisper into RoadRunner’s little ear how to attach an address book to a mail program.

Aside from that – South Carolina is apparently not the Silicon Valley of the east coast. We have one RoadRunner access point in the state. If you look very carefully on the website when you happen to have access, you can find hidden telephone numbers. That way, when the system goes out and if you have prepared well, you can call it and get a recorded message that tells you that they know all about the outage and are working on it. It is a toll free number. I have it on speed dial.

We have been having a fair bit of wind and inches of rain in this part of the country. My Internet went out, but the television still worked. I am part of the editing staff of a thrice-weekly ezine. My portion was due, it was ready, I couldn’t mail it. I had no Internet. I had no Internet for hours already, I called the helpful number, and was helpfully informed that it was being worked on. So I called Ohio, asked my sister to mail the editor in chief and tell him that I was useless.

The next morning I was thrilled, and I do mean thrilled, to have my access to the world wide web back. I use my computer frequently. I do real research on the web as well as mess around killing time. I don’t watch television, I play online.

For the last three weeks, my Internet has been an occasional, iffy thing. It comes and goes. I can load several web pages without incident and then it goes away. Then, just as mysteriously, it comes back in a minute or two or five or ten. The inconsistency is a pain when I’m checking email or surfing Fark or Zipped. But when I am researching for my writing, when I’m in the middle of an article and all of a sudden, I’m offline without a paddle, it is more than annoying. I’m not sure what to do here. I don’t know what other options I can come up with. I need high speed access because I’m spoiled and dialup would kill me. But I can’t be happy with this intermittent access.