I'm feeling particularly surly today.

In the last week, I've had internet access through my local broadband provider for all of about one and a half days (which is why there've been no more TRF pics up for a while), for reasons that are unclear. They've seemed to have a rash of outages, though, to be fair, we've had some bad weather of late, and it has been fairly reliable in the past.

Today, I was speaking about it to my friend Ceri, on a cell phone which only works about half the time here at home, as Verizon has shitty coverage hereabouts.

I don't mean in the area, I mean here in my little living space.

It works in the bathroom, sometimes in the office, never in the hallway or living room, and only in the bedroom if I hold the phone to my head on the side closest to the window at exactly 47.5 degrees, +- a degree or so, so long as it ain't cloudy, the wind isn't blowing some tree branches around, a butterfly doesn't flap its wings in China, and that you religiously, like a monk chanting his vespers, utter the mantra "Can You Hear Me Now?" about every seventeen seconds.

It's something to think about before you run out and do like I did and cancel that landline, kiddos.

Anyway, it got us to polling each other, "Who do you hate the most - the cable company or the telephone company?"

This had been for me the major factor in choosing a broadband provider - to whom did it least disgust me to send my moolah every month? Who was least likely to buttfuck me with a bevy of service charges and arcane add-on access fees, troglodyte tech reps, and a monthly invoice that only the motherfuckers that write the IRS code could love?

What a choice.

Toss in the cell phone companies, and there you have it, I said, The Geek Axis of Evile, with their Armies of Asshats, their Tech Support Terrorists, their Battalions of Bureaucrats, against whom we should all rise up with pitchforks and torches and toss into the nearest bonfire. It takes a horde to raze the Global Village.

About that time her machine crashed, and I realized I'd left out one important MVP in the category of Folks You Love To Hate, the Orcs of the Operating Sytem, the Demons of the Desktop, the Vampires of the Virii, The Balrogs of the Buffer OverRun, the Revenants of Redmond, the one and only Microsoft.

There you have it, ladies and gents, the Four HorseMen of the Techopalypse.

... Link