Adam Pash, Lifehacker associate editor, moved into a new apartment and signed up for Adelphia internet connection, which promptly had mad troubs. Which is understandable. Adelphia is bankrupt.

Time Warner bought Adelphia’s assets in California, plus Comcast’s. TW and Comcast are divvying up Adelphia’s old subscriber base in a series of deals playing out on the local level across the nation.

Great for their bottom lines, but Adam’s been shuffled between a trifecta of nonworking cable options like a shuttlecock at an epileptic badminton tourney.

Takeaway: Don’t sign up for service from bankrupt companies.

Adam’s letter, after the jump….

I just moved to a new apartment where my friendly neighborhood Comcast told me that I was no longer in their neighborhood. So I switched to my friendly neighborhood Adelphia.

In the course of one mind-blowing week, my Adelphia internet was borked for 3 out of 7 days (and I work from home!). But since I had been told that Comcast (with whom I’ve had surprisingly little trouble with in the past) didn’t service my area, and that Adelphia was pretty much my only choice for broadband, I gritted my teeth bloody and kept going.

But a week later when I called to officially cancel my Comcast account from my old apartment, Comcast told me that they now could service my area. And I said, “Great, get your asses over here! Adelphia sucks!”

So on August 1st (yesterday), I started service with Comcast and ended service with Adelphia. But guess what – something went wonky about 30 minutes after the Comcast technician left, and rather than hanging ten all over the web with Comcast’s relatively speedy 6Mbps, I was redirected on every browser request to an Adelphia installation page.

Wha? Annoyed (I left Adelphia specifically because I was sick of talking to CSR every afternoon), I called up Comcast. After much hemming and hawing (on both of our parts), the CSR told me that Adelphia and Comcast had just yesterday merged into Time Warner, and that it may be some sort of bug in a new system. In all of his kindness (actually, he was a pretty good CSR), he was sure to let me know that a technician will be on his way as early as the 3rd.

Motherfucker! So in effect, I left Time Warner for Time Warner yesterday, and now I’ve got this huge pain in my ass of a totally non-working internet connection for at least 2 days (thank god for my unsecured wireless neighborhood), and tomorrow I have to wait around for Adelphia (now Time Warner) from 8am-7pm to come pick up their cable modem and cable box as well as Comcast (also Time Warner) to try to fix my internet, which (sorry technicians) I’m not terribly confident will happen.

Anyway, I just wanted to extend my thanks to Comcast, Adelphia, and Time Warner. I appreciate all the inconvenience you put me through so that I can end up with nothing more than I had to begin with. You’re a tribute to your kind.

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