Do I look slower than usual? I should. I'm on a dial-up connection at the moment. My high-speed Internet connection — which used to come from Comcast and now comes from Time-Warner, like that's supposed to be better or something — has taken a hike on me. Want to waste a half-hour of your life? Try calling Time-Warner Cable to perchance tell them your modem is out. You will, first of all, never get to talk to a human being. There are no human beings there. The company employs only robots and they're all on their breaks.
At some point, you will get a prompt that will say, "If your Internet connection is out, press 1." You will press the damn one, thinking that will get you closer to having your Internet connection repaired. It will not. Instead, you'll go on hold and you'll listen to annoying music and announcements that repeat and repeat. One set of announcements will tell you repeatedly, "Your call is important to us" and you, being the logical sort, will think, "…but apparently not important enough to hire anyone to answer your bloody phone." The other set of announcements will tell you that you can get solutions to various problems they describe by visiting their website. And you, still being logical, will think, "Uh, the reason I'm on hold is because I can't access the Internet."
Eventually, after you've been holding twenty or thirty minutes, the phone line will just hang up on you. That's when you'll be so disgusted that you'll find an old phone cord, rig up a dial-up connection, log in at the speed of an Albanian Rain Tortoise and post this message on your weblog.
At least, that's been my experience.