I just purchased a new modem last week and I had to call Comcast (they are the only functional ISP in the southern NH area… Do you hear that Google Fiber?!) for them to put in my MAC address so I could use my own stuff. The support person who answered my call looked up the model number of my modem and regretfully informed me that my modem was already at “end of life” and Comcast wouldn’t activate it. I had to patiently disagree with her, going to far as to finally ask to speak to her supervisor so that they could help me activating my brand new modem. 

As I waited on hold I saw the refresh come through to my modem. The support person then got back on the phone and explained that some Lazarus-raising-modem-soothsayer had been discovered working nearby and was able to bless my modem from afar, raising it out of hopeless despair. I gratefully thanked her for her help, while silently cursing her employer for providing me a fraction of the bandwidth that the rest of the world enjoys, and doing so at an exponentially higher cost.