Our long national nightmare is over. Today I finally got to cancel my Hughesnet satellite internet service. My time dealing with the world’s most incredible scam is at an end. Thank God almighty.

Now, before you think I am venturing a bit into the well-worn realm of tin-hat hyperbole, let’s look around the internet and see what we find, shall we? Just type Hughesnet into Google and the top two searches are “Hughesnet complaints”, “Hughesnet problems”. Now let’s do a search on twitter to see what people are saying. Note the entire feed is littered with people complaining about things that don’t work and others that have finally given up and gone elsewhere. Not one “Hey, Hughesnet isn’t so bad, it didn’t kill my dog. At least.” There are blogs everywhere filled with complaints. (I just picked the ones I thought were the most interesting — there are tons from which to choose.) Doesn’t exactly paint the picture of the quality product delivered to grateful customers, does it?

Even with how bad the actual product is–and it is bad–the real problem with Hughesnet is the service. I have never seen gathered such a large group of incompetents. Every time you call you are sent to India. Now, I’m sure the Indian people are a lovely bunch but there are a lot of them. It makes sense that there are a lot of dumb ones. I mean really dumb ones. Hughesnet hires them by the train load. I mean, they must as people this dumb may not be able to find the office more than once so it pays to hire in bulk. I’m fairly certain that local Indian governments actually pay Hughsnet to take these people off their streets. If they were left out in the open most would drown in the rain and plug up the storm sewers to general annoyance.

Further, these poor Indians are forced to read long sentences with no punctuation. This lets us Americans bask in the glow of an addled Indian, bored out of his mind, reading a line of oddness in a stilted accent, resulting in syllables you may recall from English but could very well be a beagle that has treed the neighbor’s cat. And let me not forget the sound quality. India has a space program yet every call to South Asia sounds as if it was simultaneously being recorded and played back on a Victrola… on AM radio during an electrical storm.

This may seem like an odd Monty Python skit, but they weren’t that cruel. The BBC had standards to stop that. But in our story it gets better. The person you talk to is incapable of having a conversation without putting you on hold every other sentence. No matter how simple your question, the hold music is your destiny. You could be calling about the color of the Ganges and you would be met by a pregnant pause (and crackling static and scratchy needles, of course) followed by a quick “Hold please”. Eventually when he comes back from his stroll to the Tibeten border, you get to ask your question which leads you to the script of unrelated nonsense.

“My download speed is slow.”

“Have you had sugar before using the internets? Do not surf the web within one hour of eating sweets.”

Then when you weather that, they put you on hold for a another half-hour as you are passed to another person. A “manager” person. How they arrive at these rankings of imbeciles is quite beyond me. Maybe they have tests like who can use a stapler and still have use of their hands. Perhaps they just throw darts. Perhaps they throw them at each other. This scenario would please me greatly.

But it is no matter as the result is “manager” imbecile will ask you the same questions “drone” imbecile just asked. And so you give up. And the service never gets better. But you have no options. They very cleverly put the call center in India so you have to be really motivated to go there and drub some heads. If it were just a couple thousand miles away the blood on their campus would be seen from their inadequate satellites.

But all this has changed. We now have a pretty good connection with Verizon and this has allowed me to purchase a little router that speaks with the interwebs. It is like magic. All of a sudden I can send email, see web pages–even ones with pictures–and sometimes, if I’m really good, I can watch a video. I now see what everyone was going on about in 1996. This internet thing may very well take off!