I’m excited and honored to now be a part of the award-winning provider of news and talk radio for your mobile phone — Stitcher SmartRadio. I use this app on my Android phone and tablet to listen to shows, and I love it.

Is it wrong to foster pure, unadulterated hatred toward a corporation? I don’t think it is. Because Time Warner Cable once again can’t pull its head out of its ass, I am stranded without Internet access at my home. It’s another in the long line of outages occurring in the past couple weeks. But this has been the longest — it’s been over a day now, and they have no idea when service may be restored. Of course.

An outage occurred last week, and the customer service representative insisted that it was my cable modem, telling me that the modems that Time Warner issues are often uninspected, refurbished modems. Wonderful. Well, I drove out to the local office to get a new modem, seeing a Time Warner subcontractor working on poles outside. When the new modem I was given provided no change in my interrupted service, I called back and told the next Time Warner person that I had seen someone working outside. After being put on hold for several minutes, they came back on and said, “Oh, yeah, we are doing work in your area . . .” They have no idea what the rest of the company is doing.

They told me to call back in 2 hours if my service wasn’t back on. 3 hours later, I called back. I was told that the first crew screwed up, and they had to send a second crew to fix it. Awesome. Several hours later, I had my service back.

Since then, it’s been intermittent. It worsened over the past weekend, so I called yesterday afternoon. “You need a new modem,” they told me. I expressed how ridiculous this was, since I just got a new modem, but accepted it at first. But the more I thought about it, I realized that I should make absolutely sure that they weren’t just doing work again, and didn’t bother to tell the customer service people again. I called back, and immediately got a special message saying that there was an outage in my area. And I haven’t had service since.

What a company of retards! One part of the company doesn’t have a clue what the other is doing. The service is terrible. I’ve had a rash of rude customer service people, and when I’m promised calls back from higher-level technicians or supervisors, it only really happens about a quarter of the time. I’m sick of it.

So I’m working from Panera Bread this morning. I really feel like a hip, cool, tech-savvy guy now, blogging from Panera wi-fi, sipping coffee. Wishing Time Warner Cable would experience pain and suffering so intense that the Cenobytes from Hellraiser would shit their pants.

For the longest time, I was against HP. I had heard that their products were shoddy, so I steered clear of them. Then, a couple years ago, I decided to try them out, buying a printer for both myself and my wife. It seemed that everybody was using HP stuff, so it couldn’t me that bad, could it?

I even planned on buying a nice new souped-up desktop computer of theirs at Best Buy within the next couple months. The Best Buy salesman had nothing but good things to say about HP (of course).

However, there have been 2 big incidents in the past couple weeks that have made me wish nothing but death and destruction upon HP.

Incident #1: The Cheap and Dirty Podcast

I love this podcast. When its host Dave came on and said he’d have to put the podcast on hiatus for upwards of a month, I was flung deep into the throes of suicidal depression. Well, maybe not exactly that, but I was bummed. The reason for the hiatus? His HP laptop was going in for repairs (apparently for the 3rd time or so), and it would take several weeks for it to come back. All becaue HP can’t make a decent piece of hardware.

Myself — I have a Sony VAIO laptop that I’ve run just about all day every day for the past 2 years, and the son of a bitch is still going strong. Dave, if I could give it up, I would send it to you man. Unfortunately, it’s the computer that enables me to put food on the table.

Listen to the Cheap and Dirty Podcast here.

Incident #2: HP Tech Support

This is good.

Last week, my HP printer started acting up. I’ve only had it a couple years, and it had worked reasonably fine, although I used it maybe twice a month on average. The error message was telling me “Carriage Jam,” so I checked that the cartidges were seated correctly, and did so until the error went away. But then I immediately got an “Out of Paper” error, despite the fact there was paper in it.

So I got on the phone to tech support, which, as we all know, has been outsourced to our Hindu friends. I spoke with some lady I could barely understand, who demanded my phone number.

“Why do you need my phone number?” I asked.

“It’s policy,” she answered. “We respect your privacy, and will use your number to let you know about important updates and offers.”

I told her I wasn’t comfortable giving this information out, because all I use is a cell phone. She kept demanding the phone number, and began RAISING HER VOICE. This pissed me off — she flew right off the handle.

After asking her to speak with her supervisor half a dozen times, she finally gave in and put me on hold for over 10 minutes. Then Apu got on the line, asking me what the problem was. I told him that I felt I was being mistreated by the lady I had just spoken to, and demanded and explanation.

“We’ll take care of that after I solve your printer problem,” he said, and then proceeded to troubleshoot my printer. This was a lie, because he never addressed the problem with the lady.

Anyhow, he came to the conclusion that my printer was shot and that I would need a new one. He gave me two options: pay for a technician, or buy a new one right there and then. I told him that based on how I was treated, I will never purchase another HP product again. This didn’t seem to bother him at all.

“Thank you, have a nice day,” he said, and hung up.

What the hell kind of service is that?! First of all, I was on the phone much, much longer than I should have been because I had to keep asking these people to repeat themselves. I could not understand them. Second, the first lady yells at me for not revealing my personal information. Third, the “supervisor” tries to get more money out of me and ignores the problem I had with the lady.

That’s HP for you. Like I said, never again. I was a few weeks away from dropping over $1000 on a new computer, but I’ll opt for a Dell or a Sony. Screw HP.