Friday, April 1, 2011

Crawling At The Speed Of Snail

My internet connection is sucking the lifeblood out of me. It almost makes me yearn for the days of dial-up. Hillmomba is located smack dab in the middle of nowhere. We are unable to get cable. We are even outside the confines of HughesNet, the service that sings its high-speed praises for rural customers. We are so far out that the deep-space salvage crew who rescued Ripley and Jonesy after they jettisoned themselves from the Nostromo would still be light-years away from us.

Currently, I am using a Sprint connect-card dealybobber. It works well most days. Today is not most days.

A Pony Express rider could gallop across the continent on multiple mounts, put his feet up and eat a plate of beans while waiting for a palsied septuagenarian to inscribe my daily dose of angst onto parchment with a turkey quill and elderberry ink, court a widow-woman and propose marriage, and still deliver the finished post ahead of the page-load from Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's New Delly.

I give up.

5 comments:

Kathy's Klothesline said...

We have no cable out here. I have been told countless times by campers that I should get cable because the campers would like it. The cable people in our locality have offered to let US pay for the 6 miles of cable it would take to get cable here. I have a dish with Direct TV and for a short time we used their internet dish and Hughesnet. It was expensive and we had limited use. Due to our close vicinity to the west bound rest area on I-70, truckers would find my signal, log on and download movies, etc. This would limit the use in our patk and I had to pay for it. We have Sprint cellphones and there is a Sprint tower at the edge of our property, so we bundled it all together and have unlimited useage for one price. It can be a little slow when a lot of people here are logged on at the same time, but it beats Hughesnet. For our purposes. But If DirecWay could put a dish here, why can't they offer you the same service?

Hillbilly Mom said...

Kathy,
My Sprint unlimited usage charges me an overage fee. Yeah. Go figure. You'd think that with the price we pay for internet and FOUR smart phones, we could have truly unlimited internet. I swear, it's more than the Mansion payment.

The boys have jailbroken their phones, and get their internet connection through the phone, which is really unlimited, though I don't know if it's legal to tether like that. Problem is, the #1 son uses my connection so he can text at the same time. Which means HE is the one putting me over, what with downloading music and YouTube videos.

Darn those downloadin' truckers! Why can't they just use the rest area for anonymous sex, like in the good ol' days?

Mommy Needs a Xanax said...

You couldn't make the connection secure? Even if you didn't have truckers on the connection HughesNet would find a reason to say you're over, from what I've heard. I've only known maybe 4-5 people who had their service but they all said it was overpriced and they would cut them off mid-month if they went over, which was easy to do. My parents live in an area where they can't get cable or DSL. They have tried lots of different things but I think they settled on a Sprint card. That seems to be the least sucky option.

melyssa said...

You know what is incredibly - I mean, we're talkin Alannis Morriset worthy - IRONIC? When I tried to hit the comment link, I waited about 4 days, which is typical, and - the request TIMED OUT.

Seriously. Ironic.

We have something real dandy out in our neck of the woods, called SkyNet. They suck. I know that's an immature use of the English language, but they really do. They laugh at me when I call to complain and they always say, 'Uh, yeah, we got a guy coming right out.' Then they hang up and go back to watchin their soaps or whatever it is they do when they aren't fixing my internet.

Hillbilly Mom said...

lyssa,
That certainly takes the ironic cake. I was having trouble with the comments on Sunday. They would open up blank, and say "Done."

Those SkyNet dudes must be doing the same thing as the doctors and nurses when they leave you sitting in the exam room for two hours.