When we last left our intrepid heroine, she’d been charged with the impossible task of getting an original hardcopy of an entirely electronic document.

Since no such document exists, that obviously wasn’t going to happen.

Not their problem. Insight informed me they were holding my broadband and cable hostage until I found out where they misplaced the funds. A copy of my bank statement showing I’d paid simply wasn’t good enough. If they couldn’t find the information using their internal computer system, what alchemy was I supposed to perform for the sake of discovery? Oh, wait. I could send my thousand cybernetically enhanced uberrats into the sewers. They’d climb up every Insight customer’s toilet and search their houses for bills until they found someone with a mysterious bonus payment in my exact amount.

Screw that. I called my bank. Three customer service numbers and a trip to India later, they stopped payment on the check. There! NOW NOBODY HAS THE MONEY! The rats can stop their search for the mystery account. Can we start over from scratch?

Of course not.

It turns out Insight had the check all along. It was even somehow associated with my account, although not in a way that involved, say, paying my bill. Maybe they were using it for a complicated piece of oragami. Maybe there was an inter-office airplane fight. Regardless, one hour after the stop-payment went through, an automated call informed me my account was now being suspended for stopping payment. What? They’d already shut off my service! They denied recieving any payments since Dec. 11th! Now they were essentially admitting they had the check all along but were just holding onto it and playing mindgames with me.

I called Insight back and said look, that check’s gone bye-bye. No money has been deposited into someone else’s account. End of problem. Can we please just start over? Tell me what I owe you and I’ll go pay in cash in person. We’ll settle this today.

No deal.

When I got to the Insight kiosk in my local grocery store, they said I had a $169 credit. Buh? That completely contradicts what I’d been told an hour earlier. I tried to pay $110 for a month of service anyway, as I am SURE this is yet another bizarre error, but they didn’t want my money.

At this point, I have absolutely zero confidence that Insight’s cable or broadband won’t spontaniously shut off the next time they decide to randomize everyone’s bills. I have no idea how much money they think I owe them. Last month they wanted $485 for what should be a $110 service. Gosh, and they wonder why I called?

Chaz and I haven’t had a land line in years, but we’re seriously contemplating switching to DSL and buying our TV ala carte from iTunes. It feels like a lot more hassle - combined cable and internet with one bill and one provider is supposed to be EASY. After all the hours I’ve spent on the phone with them this month, I suspect I’d save both time and money.