heres the down low. my ISP that serves my father in-law, also serves my household. funny thing is, is that we are less than a block away from each other. well this evening his connection went the way of the do do bird. lots of intermittent connectivity brief moments of online then drops ya like a bad diaper. so I am troubleshootin like a left handed midget albino lesbian eskimo!! do some software troubleshooting then drop to windows command line. I am pinging local host check good. ping yahoo no cake, ping google nobody home I'm pingin crap off the top of my head ( sounding hollow) next I see how far i can get out. tracert its everywhere you want to be. tracert yahoo, about three hops not enough to get onto the real network, still within my ISP domain. so I i ping the three that I can trace to..... gahhhhhhhhhh
DAYUMIT!! internet goes out!!!.... AGAIN.....
so I go back to fingerF@(K!ng with the modem and its connections resetting powering down unplug re-plug so while I am waiting with bated breath for the dam thing to reset, I check to see how the security suite is holding up ( lets head over to the logs shall we? 
did I fail to mention he unplugged my dagum router/ firewall and straight piped it into the friggin modem?? so he's askin' me why the kaspersky keeps poppin up with all these warning and whatnot, because he has to click on them to make them go away and such.... I tell him that its doing what it is supposed to do and that its still working. (sorry had to hijack my own rant) drop to the logs and OH MY mutha of pearl!! sweet jumpin' jesuits on pogo sticks its gonna friggin RAIN!! over two hundred attempts were blocked in the last three days and these were simply fromother infected computers. ( I know because the IP's were logged) I don't know how many were actually script kiddies that were knocking on the back door. my router would have told me that. well after much frustration my pappy in law calls the ISP and tries to troubleshoot through them. This has now become an automated process, which I can personally classify as easily being three steps shy of a vehemently object lesson in futility. so after give the automated system a blood clot and a subsequent aneurysm some poor fellow who believes that he has the sweetest job on the planet because of the money they spent on that new fangled automagical system the helpdesk calls have shot down astronomically.young lad's phone rings, prolly interrupting him from the wonderful world of warcraft on his phat pipe connection. thinking " Oh GAWD... somebody was brain ded enuff to get this far. Boy was he in for a surprise so go back and forth with our witty banter back and forth him " do this" me"Done that twice here are my results" back and forth he gets frustrated I can hear his brain starting to cramp up moments before he begins to seize either from lack of ADHD meds or needing a fix of caffeine and warcraft. Its hard to decide which so he breaks down and sets up an appointment to have a technician come out tomorrow. I thank him for his time and hang up the phone. look over at my father in law flash a quaint little smile before letting out a labored sigh... thinking. " I have this strangely overwhelming urge to get mighty m stabby right now" but as I enhanced my calm and went to my happy place ( which involves a cross eyed midget with astigmatism, a large pineapple still attached to the branch, william gates, a five gallon bucket of anal lube mixed with paver sand and a ball gag) what came out of my mouth was " well dad, they are going to send out a tech tomorrow i am going to have a smoke" I come in after I calm down and the net is back at his house miraculously so back to his original issue.... he can't log onto a certain site. i check the cookies, then I check the certificates so I do what any other self respectin open source goober would do... I download firefox and install that sumna b!T(H tansfer over the bookmarks cookies and what not.. SKIDOOSH!! everything goes smooth like a person that drinks a gallon of malaria infested water!! hes logged in doin what he needs to be done and he looks back at me like i was some kind of internet hero!! well he's happy for the moment that firefox can get in and IE is not worth the disk space it occupies!!
so to summarize:
IE can go suck on 220 watt extension cord.
My Isp employs the least qualified for the lowest price.
I have a low tolerance threshold for automated systems and people that can't think outside their box.
violence is not the answer, but may be the temporary solution!!
windows help and troubleshooting is about as useful as a left handed football bat
interacting with my isp's tech support is like masturbating with a cheese grater ( interesting and slightly amusing at first.... but begins to chafe and rub ya raw to no end)
that has assigned my IP address 
