Mad City Broadband Less Pleasant Than Waterboarding.

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently accepted a new job. With that new job came the opportunity to lease a new office downtown. And lease one I did! It's in an interesting old building just a block off of the capitol square. It is infinitely better than any of the soul-sucking cubicle farms in the standard office parks out there in sprawlsville.

So, why am I pissed off? Mad City Broadband. For those who might not know what I'm talking about, Mad City Broadband is our "Municipal WiFi" network. What it really is, is some sort of terrible joke.

Being on a budget, as anyone involved with a small business should be, this service is appealing based on advertised cost and promised bandwidth. Since my new office contains just one employee (me) it seemed like the perfect solution. Wrong. I quickly learned that "speeds up to 1mb/sec" really means you're gonna spend a lot of time wishing you had a phone line and a 14.4kbps modem.

A week has gone by since I've subscribed to their service and it is still unusable. This is perplexing as I'm able to receive near-perfect signal strength. Instead of using the service that I paid for, I'm forced to pirate a nearby open access point with half the signal strength and 50X the performance. MCB assures me they are working on the issue. Every day they say "This is a new technology, please be patient." Today I called AT&T to come and set up DSL. It's a shame though, as I was hoping to use this alternative instead of one of the big guys.

Does anyone in town actually have good results with Mad City Broadband? I'm pretty sure city government bought into this thing with the idea that it would add to Madison's appeal as a tech center. Unfortunately, it fails in that respect.

Happy New Year....

And with that, a new start! It's been a while since my last post. There's a bunch of reasons for that, though the main one involves my former company letting me go right before Christmas after over three years of service. Such compassion! I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the way the staff is consistently treated by management. Basically, working for my former boss was reminiscent of going to the dentist for a root canal; over and over and over. Kind of like a morbid version of Bill Murray's Ground Hog's Day movie.

It's awful when that begins to happen. You wake up every day dreading an encounter with your boss. If she's in a good mood, the day will be manic. If she has a sour disposition, which more often was the case, it is impossible to do anything right. She's insulting, demeaning, and treats the staff as if they are children. She'd overhear a bit of employee to employee banter, and then start sending Instant Messages telling everyone to "shut up and get to work". She really enjoyed fabricating disparaging, factually inaccurate stories about her staff too. What's kind of frightening is that she actually believed her own made up stories!

So...enough of that. The new job is fantastic. I get to work with some really cool, professional folks who understand how to interact with people. It's almost like I've just been liberated after spending the last 3 years in one of Kim Jong Il's labor camps!

So...look for new posts soon! That is, if you are still reading this blog after my 3 month absence.