Bell line speed woes

Misc. Stories

I visit this old guy once a week, as part of my heroic volunteerism (Hi G!). He's 77, and can walk my legs off! I also got him into seeing my blog, and clicking on the ads (You better!). Cindy the Wonderdog comes and visits the whole household, including their murderous parrot.

So, one day we're walking on the river, and it starts to rain. In the wild areas, Cindy is a good dog off the leash (Don't tell that to the Dog Police!). So we duck under the Eglinton bridge, and it just starts to pour! There are these two nice chairs looking over the new graffiti, which is very nice, so the two old guys sit down and chat. I totally forget about the brown mutt! When the rain stops after a few minutes, I look around and she's gone. My heart sinks, and I'm ready for a tragedy, since she did something like this 5 years ago. So I go up to the road and whistle, and there she shows up! Seems a very nice couple had corralled her. They said she was playing in traffic! Whew!

Another day, we were walking again in the river valley, when we smelled something awful. G kept looking at his shoes, and I kept looking for overflowing sewers. It came and went. I began to suspect the dog, but she never came closer than 30 feet for some reason. I finally got her, and bent down for a sniff. GACK! CHOKE! WANNA BARF. OH GOD, I TOUCHED HER!

She had rolled in something long dead! Stay away from us, I told her, and we headed for the old ice rink. There was always snow that she could roll in. She went nuts in the snow, and that was enough to keep down the gag reflex. Finally, I had to put the stinker in the car, and give her a bath.

So, here's the title story. I've had 7 Mbits download from rotten Bell forever, but now I finally noticed that various servers were choking at that speed. Before, they could never get their overall throughput to match that. I don't have any choice here, since bankrupt Rogers has never upgraded our squirrel-infested lines, even though they say they did.

Naturally, I wanted to bump up the speed, since I have graduated to Youtube TV on the PS3, which is a great addictive time-waster. I would save the money by cutting off my Bell satellite, which had become horribly expensive ("Our new minimum plan, at a big hike, now comes with more channels!"). I phoned for the 16 Mb plan. -"Oh yes sir, you qualify, no problem!" After several days, nothing happened to my speed! I phoned technical support, and 7 Mb is the max my DSL line can handle! Mad I was! I got back to service, and asked for my old plan back. "Oh no sir, we don't offer that sweet plan anymore, it's 6 Mb for the same price, and we have to charge to bump up your download max".

Bugger! So today I checked, and the bleeps have choked the line to exactly 6 Mbits! And they are sending me a new modem because they were blaming that for the speed limit. Geez, the life of a monopoly. No wonder Canada is going downhill.