our cable/internet company

Five years ago, we were building our current (and if I have my way, last) house. One of the selling points (granted, not a huge one, but one nonetheless) was the community was going to have its own cable/internet company. We were going to have fiber optic cable running through the whole neighborhood and blazing fast internet, and state of the art cable service from a small company on the cutting edge. If you can imagine it, we were going to have it.

Well, it turns out the theory of fiber is apparently better than the practice, especially in an area that sees a lot of lightning. Replacing all that fiber with something that actually works ran the small company into bankrupcy and the holding company is great at saying, "No, we're way too small to provide (insert whatever cool service other cable companies have provided for years now here)." So, no high definition, no on-demand service, no spam or spyware filters, and yeah they say they can make the internet faster (which it was supposed to be to start with), but for a price...above and beyond what you're already paying, and no competition, because they get their fees paid our of our homeowners fees. Sure, you can get something else (like satellite service), but you're still paying these guys. Across the street to the north, in Jacksonville, Comcast (which we can't get) is providing all that stuff. Isn't that special.

Imagine my surprise when we got an e-mail last week saying they were upgrading their e-mail system and actually putting in some spam/spyware control. Yeah, the service would be out in the wee hours of Monday morning, but hey...we were leaping into the new decade! That excitement lasted till last night, when I actually tried to get into my e-mail account...and couldn't. It seems it wanted the passwords for all our accounts, and I entered them...but the server wouldn't accept them. I called the company and got a machine. No, much to my chagrin, not much has changed.