Hey.  Y'know what really grinds my gears?  Planned obsolescence and forced upgrades.

My family's ISP recently informed us that after years of planning and development, they were finally rolling out their BIG NEW SYSTEM--bigger, better, faster!!  The wave of the future!!    As subscribers, we were entitled to a free upgrade to better equipment that would give us faster speeds.  Let me rephrase that--we were given an ultimatum that we were required to return our old modems and routers and get new ones, and failure to comply would eventually result in a lost equipment fee and the old equipment being shut down once they take the old system offline.

Now, I've had my tried and true equipment for many years, and it's served me perfectly and faithfully without a single problem, ever.  Our internet speed has always been fine, too.  There's no need for any faster.  What we had previously was 200mbps.  The new equipment gets (up to) 1gbps.  Five times faster.  Sounds great, right?  Except that for us it's completely irrelevant.  Everything already loaded/streamed instantly.  Everything downloaded super fast.  Online gaming was perfect and smooth.  And, as we all know, latency is far more important for gaming than download/upload speed, which is why I use a wired connection for my gaming setup.  The new speed isn't even noticeable.  It would be like if they unveiled a new light bulb that lights up at TEN TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT.  So, try turning on a light switch in your house, and then imagine turning on the same switch, but the bulb lights up in one tenth the time.  Would you notice?  You're literally incapable of noticing.  That's how irrelevant and meaningless this speed upgrade is for me.

Literally the only place where it's noticeable is when downloading a very big game on Steam.  Like, at least 50GB.  I used to put on some music while a big game downloaded for 20 minutes.  Now it finishes in 5.  Great.  Okay.  That's nice.  But does that matter in the slightest to me?  Nope.  It's not like I download a 100GB every day.  I download a large game maybe twice a year.  Then I spend months playing it.  The speed difference is simply meaningless to me.

But why am I so grumpy about it?  Here I am complaining about something that's better!  What's the problem?  The problem is that from the moment my ISP made this announcement, I knew it was going to be trouble, and I was right.  Weeks without internet and countless hours on the phone with useless, ignorant customer service trying to troubleshoot endless problems is what I had to look forward to.  It's working now, but it's been a rollercoaster of headaches, mostly because of employee ignorance and incompetence.  Their BIG NEW SYSTEM rollout was about as smooth and well-thought-out as the f*ckin' Hindenburg.  They weren't really ready, and nobody knew what the f*ck was going on.

I just hate being forced to change and upgrade things that are working perfectly.  I often feel like my entire life is nothing but IT troubleshooting, AND I'M NOT AN IT WORKER!!  If they want to upgrade their sh*t, fine, but why do they have to shut off my old equipment?  Why couldn't I have just kept using it as long as it physically worked?  I'm just so sick of having to change and upgrade things.  It never ends, it never stops, it never slows.  I just want a break for awhile...