After crawling out of bed bright and early to take Hershey for a nice morning stroll, discovering it was pouring rain, crawling back into bed, and getting up a bit later, I flipped on the computer (it’s the second thing I do after getting up in the morning–use your imagination for the first) to discover my cable modem wasn’t speaking to anyone.

I turned on the TV–The Weather Channel (12) was just fine. I checked the phone. Dial tone. Hmm. Tried the obvious Internet fixes. Nope. I picked up the cordless and called my provider (if it’s any indication how often I’ve had to do this, I don’t need to look their number up anymore). Their brilliant solution (which I wound up learning on my cell phone, because the landline dropped off in mid call and wasn’t working, so the tech called me back on the cell) was my personally provided cable modem (dug out of my moving boxes when the provider provided POS died in the first two days of service and I didn’t want to wait until after the holiday weekend for them to replace it) must have gone bad. He’d be happy to schedule a service call, so they could bring one of theirs (which has no standby switch for security when I’m not using it, which is why I prefer my Motorola SURFboard) by to troubleshoot. Oh, Monday is the soonest. OK.

After hanging up, I checked my landline. Still dead. Called them back to add that problem onto the existing trouble call–I’m glad I have a cell phone and rollover minutes. I will never get a cable-provided landline again. All the reasons I’d avoided it in the past have proven to be good reasons to never do it again. When the cable’s out; the phone’s out. I’m one of those funny people who believe phone service should be all-weather–even when the power is out.

Rainy Saturday with no Internet. Check out the TV. Bottom channels are fine. Above 27, they get fuzzy, and above 31, they’re gone. I called them back to add that outage to the ticket.

Show of hands. How many electronics technicians read this blog? You’re knowing what I’m knowing, right? I don’t have a bad cable modem. It’s raining outside. Cable service is notoriously unreliable in the rain. I figure they’re going to realize they have an outage or something that got wet will dry out. I’m annoyed the company appears a) unable to acknowledge this, and b) doesn’t seem to know it to acknowledge it.

The rain slowed down, and a little after one o’clock Central Time, my services are back on line (upper cable channels still a bit fuzzy). Bad personally provided cable modem, my foot!