Is life too short or too long...

...to drink bad beer? (Or insert your favorite version of the saying.)

People frequently say "life is too short to drink bad beer".

I've said it. But, I've reconsidered.

I think life is too long to drink bad beer. Let's say I expect to have beer on average once a week for the next 40 years. That's about 2,000 times. That is a lot of times to suffer through bad beer. On the other hand, if life were shorter, drinking bad beer would be a smaller mistake, no?

If you believe private businesses are better...

... than the government, you're clearly not a Comcast customer.

Here is an abbreviated version of the Kafkaesque nightmare labyrinth I had to navigate to get cable TV and Internet in my apartment:

• I moved into my apartment on November 22 and I called Comcast the same day. 
• A few days later a technician came out "sometime between 1-5 PM" (showed up at 4:30 PM) to do the installation but failed because the signal going into the apartment was too weak. 
• Not only was he not able to fix that but he said that Comcast would not fix it - I needed to get my landlord to hire an electrician to fix the wiring going into the apartment. It surprised me that a cable company can't fix their own cables.
• Here's the highly abbreviated part. The next two months consisted of a circus of phone calls between me, my landlord, his general contractor and Comcast, trying to find out exactly what we needed to do. Rewiring the entire apartment would require tearing up walls, and we were trying to get Comcast to come out and help us determine at what point the signal degraded, since only Comcast has the equipment to  test whether the signal is strong enough, but they refused. "The wiring outside the apartment was not their responsibility."
• Finally, last week, the general contractor brought in an electrician who quickly determined that Comcast had connected the cables incorrectly where they split inside my apartment to the different rooms, so he fixed that.
• Then I got Comcast to come out again last Thursday ("sometime between 1-5 PM" but they showed up at 11:30 AM - good thing I was home) and the installation seemed to work fine.
• Except, after the technician had left I noticed that I didn't have HBO, which I was supposed to get for free for 6-months as part of the introductory package I'd selected.
• I called Comcast and asked them to fix it, being transferred around to five different people. The first three said they couldn't help me but would transfer me to someone who would. Each time I had to tell them my name, address, phone number and last four digits of my social security number. The fourth person said he couldn't help me but he would enter a help ticket for me and someone would call me back. While he was entering the ticket I got disconnected. I called back and asked someone whether they could look at my account and see if a ticket had been entered, and they said "no". So, I explained the problem and asked her to enter a ticket for me, and she said "that's not necessary, I can fix it for you" and two seconds later HBO appeared on my TV. 
• Yesterday I received my first bill and saw that I was being charged $19.95 for HBO in addition to the intro package.That explains why she was able to fix it so quickly - she didn't understand what I needed.
• Given the poor experience with their phone support, I opted for sending them a detailed email explaining the billing issue. From this point forward, everything worked surprisingly well. Within 24 hours I got a response confirming that they understood the problem and that I needed to contact them via online chat to confirm my identity, which I did today and within 20 minutes everything appeared to have been fixed.

So, I spent the first 10 weeks in my new apartment without TV or Internet and I don't even know how many hours of my time it took (including staying home from work twice) before everything was resolved. Things appear to be working well, now, though. 

Knock on wood.