My self installation kit for my upgraded cable (Xfinity/Comcast) arrived Monday. I set it aside and finally approached it yesterday afternoon. The only reason I subscribed to an upgrade was that it offered double the internet speed for another $10 a month.

I opened the box and read the instructions which were simple. Unfortunately they involved using a TV. We are ready to toss our TV since we do not use it. I restrained from getting rid of it since the sales person told me I would need it to activate my service. Reading over the material I couldn’t quite understand how I would retain my wifi modem service.

I began looking online for the answer to this question. Several times online chat people from the company seemed to be ready for questions. But when I tried to respond the chat interface went into a loop and never resolved.

Finally I logged on to my Comcast website and started poking around. This time the live chat worked. “Live” chat these days seems to be very canned.

I had trouble getting the robot/person to understand my question. They kept responding with canned phrases about  helping me and how excited I will be about my service.

Finally my laptop battery gave out suddenly. It has been doing this lately with what seems like no warning. More on this later. I was trying to revive it  when my cell phone rang. I was surprised that the person on the other end answered to the robot/person i.d. of the chat.

While she and I continued our online chat live. she continuing to misunderstand my question, I idly did a speed test of my connection. It came up around 40 MPS which is roughly double its usual speed.

At this point, I thanked the service rep and told her I was sorry to have bothered her because my internet speed was apparently activated.

At no point in my conversations with these people do I think they understood that I was not going to us my Cable TV despite the many times I told them this. The original sales person told me I would need to activate my new service, but this only applied to the fucking Cable TV. It seems they could not conceive that I wasn’t going to use my Cable.

Sigh.

But now it works and that’s good I guess.

Unfortunately last night my little laptop which I use the hell out of gave off foreboding rattling sounds. Mechanical rattling sounds. This can’t be good. It happened again this morning. Ay yi yi. I like the fact that this laptop was an early version of the Windows 8 and does not have a touch screen. Judging from the frustrating intermittent functioning of my larger, newer laptop, this lack of touch screen speeds up the whole computer and makes its easier for me to use.

Both Eileen and I regularly are frustrated by the hiccuping and slowness of our big fancier laptop which we use basically to watch online TV and I use to listen to music.

I will miss this laptop if it dies. But at least these days a lot of my stuff is stored online. I worry about the little exterior hard drive where I store music and pictures. I really need to back that up.

This stuff makes me crazy.