As you may recall, everyone in my neighborhood was recently switched — against our will, I might add — from Comcast High Speed Internet to Road Runner High Speed Internet. Road Runner has done such a poor job that they keep sending out apology e-mails and, since they apparently don't trust their own assurances that everything's getting fixed, apology paper mails, as well. As well they should. A quick check of recent e-mail arrivals suggests that about half of all I receive are arriving promptly but others are dribbling in hours — in some cases, days — after they were sent.
One friend sent me an e-mail that demanded an urgent reply. When he didn't receive one in twelve hours, he sent another message. And then the next day, he sent another. All three arrived simultaneously in my inbox, six hours after he sent the third. For some reason, mail sent from America Online accounts seems to take especially long. At one point, Road Runner was marking everything that came from an AOL address as Spam but that problem seems to have ceased. The funny thing, of course, is that Road Runner and AOL are both owned, as we all will someday be, by Time-Warner.
My Internet connection also disappears about once a day for 10 or 15 minutes. Naturally, it seems to only occur when there's something I desperately need to send out immediately. This is obviously an advance on the technology that makes your printer break down only when there's fifteen minutes to get the job printed out and delivered to FedEx.
We're dealing with it all as well as we can. But there's not a whole lot we can do.