Took a couple days off again. Partly because, for one of those days, I was offline. Not the story I mentioned last time; more the sad fact that I get occasionally online through Comcast.

It’s impressive, to me, how much these people are able to suck.

Most people would [and do] complain that they suck for costing a couple hundred bucks a month. That’s not really my largest issue, though I suppose it’s valid enough. I’m trying to think what else costs a couple hundred a month; but, really, I’m trying to think what else costs that little: I spend more than that per month at Starbucks. Though they could be accused of sucking too—often by the hipsters hanging out in there, complaining that coffee’s five bucks, which they cheerily spend in exchange for permission to hang out and complain about it.

I suppose there are other services, billed monthly. NetFlix.com for…whatever that is per month—twenty or thirty, I suppose. And GameFly.com for…I dunno—fifteen to twenty? I’m lucky to know that coffee’s five bucks; I don’t really track expenses.

I suppose the phonebill’s a couple hundred per month. I think. Ish. Though there’s a cheat going on there: one phone’s whatever per month; the other’s something like ten bucks more, plus about thirty for the whole Unlimited Data thing. And my largest complaint about VerizonWireless is that they were one of the major companies lying hard enough to redefine 4G down from a gigabit to…whatever slowassed speeds 4G phones actually get. Not really my immediate problem, the Droid3 being 3G and therefore about twice the speed of ISDN fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago, ISDN, at 128kbps, was a thousand bucks a month. I know that one. So, again, it’s not easy to whimper about a couple hundred a month for thirty-odd megabits.

Of course, that’s still relative. When I called in a week or two ago to talk to that retentard, he assured me that Comcast were the Lamborghini of ISPs—a statement I remember clearly, since I was moderately impressed that he’d gone with Lamborghini. Most people lying about things compare those things to Ferrari. Having had a Ferrari once, I’d have agreed with the retentard about Comcast being the Ferrari of ISPs. In my experience, Ferraris will go two hundred miles per hour—just, not in a row.

So, where Comcast can hit 30mbps down and about 15mbps up, in bursts, and only because I’m the only guy in my neighbourhood not using DSL and therefore controlling two separate hubs, it becomes rapidly irrelevant once you average in the downtime while I’m at zero megabits. They might have whatever 99.9% uptime [I doubt it], but that’s meaningless unless I’m using the service for exactly all of the 99.9% and ignoring the ‘net for that final 0.1%. Which isn’t the case.

There’s no logical reason for any downtime, really—particularly any downtime long enough to be noticed. Again: I’m on two separate hubs and I’ve got no competition here. Any downtime at all is necessarily on Comcast’s end, nowhere near my house. It’s necessarily their system sucking.

Also, there are on average 730.484 hours in any given month. Minus 99.9% is only forty-four minutes [forty-three minutes, fifty seconds, if you wanna be annoyingly technical]; so, no, going offline for three to thirty-odd hours per month is not in point of fact being online 99.9% of the time. Whether the actual uptime is better than that of a Ferrari or not.

What happens when you call in and complain about this? Well, the first thing that happens is that some Paki recommends calling back during business hours to talk to someone with a vocabulary of more than fifty-three Englishish words. But, if you add twelve hours to the downtime and do that, Comcast fix the problem with Free Pie.

Seriously. They’ve adopted the inane VillageIdiotic practice of making up for your mushroomy pancakes with Free Pie. Or, in this case, Free HBO.

If I wanted HBO, your first hint would be that I’d asked for it. Possibly online. Through some other ISP.

Not that I mind having HBO. I just don’t see how it helps. Like, I can watch something six months after I didn’t watch it through NetFlix.com because Comcast couldn’t keep me online? I’m calling that a fifty percent downtime, then.

Not that I’m truly entirely offline. Because I’ve still got my phone. Now I can hit comcast.net through my Droid3 and through VerizonWireless. And just in time to get bounced by a server SysOpped by an idiot from comcast.net to m.comcast.net, which pretty much lets me look at my EMail [not actually, since I don't use whatever@comcast.net for EMail] and nothing the hell else. No link to the real site, from which I could go in and see what in hell the problem might be; no ability to tell the phone to hit comcast.net and get there without being kicked yet the hell again to m.comcast.net.

Whatever I’m paying a couple hundred bucks a month for, it doesn’t seem to be for paying an actual biped to set up their retarded server.

Oh yeah. If and when someone from Comcast sees this, since the one thing they’re known to be good for is throwing around Lamborghinoid Damage Control: I know how to set up a server to prevent smartphones from getting trapped in m.comcast.net EMailChecking Hell; I get $150,000 per year for that, telecommuting. You can get back to me after you’ve run your CostBenefit on the idea and worked out that an ISP having maybe a working server is regarded by people as something of a good thing.

So, I took a couple days off. Partly due to Comcast’s laughable incompetence. And now, while I am to my knowledge back online at home, I’m sitting at VillageIdiot [which may throw Free Pie at me if I complain that there's ice in their carpark], WiFied in to write this. Also, I glanced at http://www.amazon.com/Offline-ebook/dp/B0071BY5B6 and discovered that, likely to make the world as weird as possible, that shortstory thing I uploaded before being incompetented offline [called, amazingly enough, Offline] had been updated slightly to include a LOOK INSIDE! option. Just in case you wanna read the first four paragraphs of this TwelveKindlePage epic before spending ninety-nine cents on it.

I’ve never understood how people think. I just used to assume that they did.

Here’s today’s webcomic; guess what prompted me to draw it up [and upload it way later]:

More later….

Gremlin has 4496 followers and 3372 tweets.