"I'm from the cable company and I'm here to help you."

I knew I should have paid more attention when I got the EXCITING NEWS FROM ROADRUNNER! letter and email a few weeks ago. I scanned them briefly, to confirm that (a) the price wasn't going obscenely up and (b) they were still going to forward my office mail from the adelphia.net address. The rest got consigned to the rubbish bin of irrelevance and was totally forgotten....

Until this morning, that is, when every website I tried to access gave me a not-so-happy screen from Time Warner AND Comcast. Yea, both of the behemoths, who picked the Adelphia carcass clean lo these many years ago.

The screen said, in essence, we've finally gotten round to turning off the old adelphia.net servers, and if you want to access the internet, you'll need to change IP and DNS settings on your computer from "static" to "automatic."

Fine. I checked the settings, and they were already ticky-boxed to what they were supposed to be. The screen offered no other support suggestions or contact numbers, so I gritted my teeth and started calling the cable company.

Round one: TWC couldn't even find my phone number. Call Center Grrl fixed that in the database, tried to sell me digital phone service, and rather quickly forwarded me to RR tech support.

Round two: RR saw the modem, could see a router attached to it, took me through a couple of steps, and forwarded me to National RR tech support.

(We're now into Hour Number Two, if you're keeping score at home.)

Round three: After a painfully long hold, interrupted every minute after about the 20th with "you have been on hold longer than we would have liked," a human finally came on the line and diagnosed the problem. By bypassing the router, everything worked fine. The other two users here, though, would not be pleased, so I was finally offshored to Netgear technical support, or, as Robin Williams once put it,.....

GOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, BANGALORE!

(Hour number three began somewhere between the "bang" and the "lore.")

----

In a battle of accents, cultures and expertise (They tried to explain the "command prompt" box like I was some kind of idiot, despite the fact I used DOS, CP/M before it and IBM/CMS before that, long before any of these clowns were even born), we ultimately got nowhere. They could not get their router to work with a different server address than the one it had previously known and loved.  I was faced with either buying a new router or a bunch of long cords to hardwire the other two laptops to the modem, but in a final effort, I accessed the Netgear "dashboard" page one last time and manually entered the IP and DNS addresses that it could plainly "read"-

...and, amazingly, got all three puters back online through the router, two of them wirelessly. Six. Fuck. King. Hours. Later.

All the while, Windows Update was bitching about the Very Important Installation it was dying to serve up, my office phone was blinking on and off like a beer sign, and I never got out of my Shea Stadium shirt and shorts the whole damn day.

But damn the stone knives and bearskins, we're moving full steam ahead again.