Bad Service is almost as bad as no service at all

I live in a neighborhood that can't decide which suburb it's a part of. As a result, there is only one air conditioner repair company available, and only one cable company.

Every single year something goes wrong with the A/C. We got one of the units replaced last year, and it's already broken down. We have two units in the house (one for upstairs, one for downstairs) and if it isn't one unit, it's the other. Every single year. And we can't do anything about it.

The cable company--well, all I have to do is say the word "Charter" and that pretty much explains it all. Can someone please explain to me how having a wireless router correctly hooked up to your cable modem can somehow prevent said modem from working AT ALL half the time? I can sort of understand having difficulty connecting to the Internet via the router. But when I try to connect from the computer that's directly connected to the modem, and the cable TV is working, I had better be able to connect! I do the unplugging the modem trick--sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. More often than not, the latter is the case, and at the price we're paying for cable Internet, it doesn't make sense for our connection to break down literally every other day.

There should be a law banning local monopolies...