@Home

I spent four hours on the phone with tech support at @Home last night. My cable modem was down when I left for work yesterday, but I thought there might have just been a brief outage. When I came home and discovered it was still down, I started calling in. After four hours of waiting on hold, getting disconnected, and being told to try various stupid things, they finally admitted that the box was shot. They helpfully told me that someone would come out and replace it, on the third day of November. One of the techs actually told me that the cable modem shouldn't be plugged into a surge protector, as "that can reduce the amount of power that it gets". Right, yeah, sure.... This morning, I called the local cable company and told them that if it was going to take that long, I'd like to just bring the box in and swap it myself. They were exceptionally helpful, and said that someone could certainly be there sooner than that, and would today at noon be okay? So, I'll be going home for lunch today, and hopefully will be back on-line before I return...