Fourth time the charm?

This summer has not been a good one for utility reliability. In the past 3 months, we have lost power, once for 36 hours, three times. And our cable which feeds our land phone line, has been out more than twenty times. Every time I see the communication giant's commercials (rhymes with Bombblast) about how fast their service is compared to DSL, a wave of irritation goes over me. When we had DSL and old fashion phone service, we rarely lost it except with those power outages but this cable is not reliable at all. We had the cable guy over for the fourth time yesterday. He's a very friendly guy and admitted that the problem might be beyond my house as some others in the neighborhood are having problems too. He changed the modem and said everything seems to check out. A few hours later, I am on the phone with  a financial person trying to straighten out an issue and the phone goes dead. I assume the other person thought I hung up on her. I call back on my cell. Later it repeats itself while I am on the phone with a good friend. Argh! And this service has a monoply here..

So we have a week of beautiful Indian summer. I will try to enjoy.