Incredulous.

Miraculously, I received a call Saturday morning right around ten a.m., the beginning of the window that Time Warner had given us. A Time Warner crew chief was downstairs. Yes, yes, by all means, come right up, sir! He came up. Nice guy, let's call him V. He took a look around, and noticed that, hey, the contractor who'd set everything up had used a staple gun to hold the wires in place. 

A STAPLE GUN. (Can you guess where this is going?) 

Oh yes. The original contractor had, in fact, STAPLED THROUGH THE WIRES, so that the metal of the staple had gone through the outside coating of the wires and was touching the metal of the wires themselves, causing it to short out. WHAT DO YOU KNOW. A STAPLE GUN.

Our guys don't use staple guns, said V. (I should explain: apparently TW doesn't have enough of their own guys to do installations, so they sub-contract. Apparently they sub-contract to incompetent contractors.) V said TW contractors never used staple guns. Well, okay, but it wasn't like we called an outside source ourselves, so for all intents and purposes, this WAS a Time Warner contractor. And he used a staple gun. But V took out the offending staples, so that part of the problem was fixed.

Next came a technician. Let's call him T. T looked at our signal online and said that it looked too strong (which is just as bad as too weak, as it happens. Gotta find that happy medium). He put some sort of splitter cable in, saying we should have had that all along (oh? Then why did NO OTHER TECHNICIAN who had been here ever say anything about it?), and then said he wanted to check out back too. Unfortunately, we don't have access to our backyard, and our landlord wasn't home, so T went out my window and down the fire escape.

Out the window.

Down the fire escape.

He came back up after a while, but said that he wanted to check if the cable was loose, and, unfortunately again, the cable box was up a pole in the neighbors' yard. And the neighbors' dog was in their yard, barking like there were ten thousand squirrels up a tree and generally going batshit crazy. We rang the neighbors' bell (maybe - our doorbells don't work, why should theirs?), but no answer. 

However, the internet connection did seem to be working, so we thought that maybe between taking out the staples and putting in the splitter that maybe, maybe, the problem had been solved. We said goodbye to T.

My roommate - my hero and a total rockstar - spent AN HOUR on the phone with Time Warner, and emerged victorious: they are going to give us a credit for almost everything we've paid so far (as we've been paying for a service that HASN'T WORKED, it seemed only fair). We exchanged a double high-five of epic proportions.

Then we hosted the aforementioned lovely fall potluck.

When we woke up this morning, the internet was out. It has been out all day so far.

I can think of some things I would like to do with a staple gun right now.