Powell v. Cable Company

If I had a business, I'd run it just like Time Warner Cable. If we're running a little short on funds, I'll bill people twice. If someone is having a problem with their service, I'll route their call to an Zulu bushman who spits at the phone and casts a spell at them. And if we're hungover after appletini night at the bar, we'll just shut our routers down and tell our customers to cram it with walnuts. Given the state of my internet service lately, those boys have been on one hell of a bender.

One of the bad things about big business is that they're not really scared of an individual customer. If I ran into the Time Warner lobby and screamed the previous paragraph, I wouldn't hear a collective gasp, followed by, "Oh Mr. Powell, allow us to fix it!" I wouldn't even hear someone say, "We're working on it." Instead, I'd hear the receptionist whisper into the phone, "Security, we have an issue." And then when I got home, I wouldn't have pay-per-view access anymore.

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Just go into a bar one day and loudly state, "You know who's great? Time Warner." That place would immediately turn into the bar from Roadhouse, pre-Swayze. There's just no way to listen to a blatant lie like that without throwing a chair.

What do we do, citizens of the world? Right now, I'm leaning towards starting an Internet of my own. We won't have many sites, email accounts, or search engines, but we will have a kicking repository of Octopussy pics. That's probably where internet use is headed, anyway.