Living on the Moon

I live, obviously, in the country. When I first moved here as a child, the road was a barely paved, unnamed stretch of ignored gravel. Now we have a name and even one of those new-fangled yellow lines down the middle. What we don't have? Cell phone reception or high speed internet. My house is probably the last cell dead zone in Delaware. It's true. I can get reception in my yard, but inside we get just enough signal to make the phone ring, but not enough to take the call.

Internet is even more fun. Here I am, 5 miles from a town that, though small, has DSL, cable, Fios, every technology you would care to choose from, and my only choices are dial-up or satellite. Comcast likes to tease me by sending me offers of cable internet service for about half what I pay for satellite. And, like Charlie Brown running to kick Lucy's football, I'll call them up, ever hopeful that this will be the time they mean it. At first they'll tell me they can provide service at my address, but it always ends up the same. My address isn't in the service area, I'm too far off the road, they can do it but installation will cost $5000, etc. So I continue to limp along with my over-priced satellite internet because it is, after all, faster than dial-up (as long as it doesn't rain hard).

The whole thing makes me rather grumpy. What's a girl need to do to get a little technology? I'm really not out in the middle of nowhere--more like the edge of somewhere. I am smack in the middle of the great urban centers of the east coast, but I might as well live on a 500-acre ranch in Montana or the moon, for all the notice these companies take of me and my neighbors (yes, there are other people out here). Come to think of it, I think the astronauts on the space station have better connection speeds than I do.