My ISP is Comcast, and after years of nosebleed inducing DSL service (which was due to the crappy phone lines in the building I live in, and not my provider or DSL in general) I have to say that I am really happy with the level of service comcast has provided me with so far.

Last night there was a service outage, however, and it told me so when I called their support hotline.

Now, when you call their support hotline it guides you thru the typical menu:

• English or Spanish
• Business or Residential
• TV or Broadband Internet
• Email or Connectivity

etc.

when you finally arrive at English - Residential - Broadband - Connectivity the friendly voice mocks you by suggesting to go to the comcast web page to try to resolve your problem instead.

WTF?

OK, so you ignore that and

• a service rep comes on surprisingly quick,
• who doesn't seem to be sitting in Bangalore,

kudos to comcast. You feel you are spending your ISP $$ smartly.

But then they make you power-cycle all your equipment and keep telling you things that are definitely not true, like everything checks out ok.

Would I be calling if everything was OK?

Frustrated you hang up and call back and a different rep comes on and confirms that there is an outage.

WTF?

Then you talk to a neighbor in the same building who has exactly the same problems and who was made to schedule an appointment with a technician to come out and check the cables and prod the router. Of course he is told he would incure a $50 charge if the problem was with his equipment and not with comcast.

All the while it is a networking problem 1000% outside.

How do you proove that to the service rep on the other end, holding all the cards? And you have to bite your tounge not to let slip that you are not using a windows PC to begin with, because that would probably get your service request dropped right then and there?