our decision made

our decision made

I hate our cable company, DirecPath. We’ve had them for a little over a year now, and they’ve given us a lot of problems during that time. Our internet has gone out frequently, and it usually takes them a week to get someone out to fix it. In the meantime, they give us the runaround on the phone, making it very difficult to get any answers.

Oh, and the strangest thing of all. Sometime last fall/winter, our IP address somehow registered as being in Spain (???). I really don’t understand this at all, but our internet went out for a while, and when it came back our default language was set to Spanish. Anytime we went to a website with language preferences, it automatically reverted to Spanish, and any currency was set to Euros. (Thank goodness it was Spanish and not something like Farsi that I wouldn’t be able to navigate my way out of!) It was more annoying than anything – it is SO DIFFICULT to convince Google to display things in ENGLISH. The worst was when we tried to go to a site to sign up for something, and it wouldn’t let us on the site because we had to be in the United States.

We spent many hours on the phone with DirecPath and they were clueless about our “issue”. Finally we dropped it, and at some point our IP address changed to some city in Canada. That was cool with me, I like being able to mess with peoples’ site statistics like that. :-)

Anyways, last time the internet went out Paul and I explored our options. We wanted to get away from cable internet, and the only other viable option was DSL. The big problem: with cable internet we got cable TV. I know a lot of my readers are anti-TV, but we enjoy watching shows and relaxing/cuddling on the couch, etc. TV for me has always been a family time – growing up, we watched as a family, and I have a lot of positive memories.

We never decided to make the switch to DSL, but now the decision has been made for us. Sometime last week, DirecPath cut off our cable.

Finally today we called to find out what was up. Turns out, without any courtesy of a warning or explanation by either our apartment complex or DirecPath, they converted our whole complex to digital. That means no more free TV with cable internet. We have to pay to get any sort of cable, the cheapest package starting at $53. Eeep.

Of course, TV isn’t important enough to me to pay that. And also, there goes any reason we had for staying customers of DirecPath. We are now free to switch to DSL without regrets! Yay for that! Booo for no longer having TV. :-( We hooked up our bunny ears and were able to get a half-decent CBS, which is good because the one show I can’t find anywhere online (Criminal Minds) is on CBS. (We’re a little confused about the whole digital/analog thing, so maybe we’ll be able to get a clear picture if we play around?)

Oh and just to confuse things – we’re not even sure we’ll be living here past October, when our lease is up. So it kinda doesn’t make sense to get DSL right now. :-( But if the CARES Team thing doesn’t work out and we DO end up renewing our lease, then we’ll be definitely switching.

Side note: I’ve been complaining a lot about my apartment complex recently. We were happy with them when we first moved here, but recently it seems they’ve been really non-communicative. There is a rumor that I haven’t been able to confirm that the complex was bought out and everyone in the leasing office was laid off. If that’s true, then that explains why they’ve been ignoring repeated maintenance requests and overall not seeming to care about their residents. Also, our buildings are old and things are falling apart. We have dealt with issues in our apartment since they day we moved in. I think I’m just fed up with them right now.

Second side note: Stay far away from DirecPath!!! Unfortunately they service apartment complexes, so you usually don’t have a choice about whether you can go with them or not, but if you have the choice avoid any dealings with them!

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