Time Warner.. grr

Last night as I sat down to write my blog entry, I realized to my dismay that my internet had stopped working..again. Not only did I lose internet, but I also lost cable as well which led me to not be able to work nor procrastinate. After calling Time Warner and receiving no good news whatsoever, I thought about how this whole cable thing works. When I'm paying for cable and internet, but not receiving it, how exactly can that be fair? Well, it's definitely not fair. If consumer surplus is the total amount of benefit that I receive as a consumer, it dwindles down to nothing when I lose my connection and in turn creates a deadweight loss. Not only does my consumer surplus decrease but producer surplus decreases as well since Time Warner now has to use resources to fix these problems free of charge (not that they always decide to do that...). So for the time period that I was without cable, which was surprisingly not days or even weeks, I was receiving zero consumer surplus and Time Warner was receiving zero producer surplus and the whole thing was just a big ol' deadweight loss. All together it seems that this a lose-lose situation even though I'm pretty sure that Time Warner has significant market power and is coming closer and closer to becoming a monopoly and taking over the entire industry in which case, we're all at their mercy and they can do whatever they darn well please(God help us)... but that could just be me.