I prefer to deal with locally owned, mom-and-pop establishments whenever I can. It’s a matter of principle for me (the principle being that I think large national corporations are, by nature, more interested in serving their shareholders than their customers). I buy books at Sam Weller’s, groceries at Harmons, and I get my morning caffeine fix from either The Coffee Garden or the Salt Lake Roasting Company. And when I finally decided several years ago to get myself some home Internet access, well, naturally, I went with a hometown service provider, a little outfit called ArosNet.

For five years, I had absolutely no complaint with Aros. My access was generally reliable, the folks in the accounting office were pleasant to deal with when I made my payments, and the one time I had to contact tech support, they bent over backwards to resolve my problem. I felt good writing out my checks, knowing that my money was going into the pockets of my neighbors instead of to some corporate overlord five states away. I imagined that I’d probably be writing checks to Aros for a very long time to come.

Several months ago, however, something started to go wrong with ArosNet. Service became spotty. Some nights, I had difficulty getting online; I had to try logging in mutlitple times before the connection took. Other times I could get on, but I had trouble accessing specific web sites — and no, I’m not talking about the sites you can’t look at in public libraries. I’m referring to ordinary, innocuous stuff like the Internet Movie Database. Most disturbingly, I started hearing from friends that their email messages to me weren’t getting through.

And then one week service ceased altogether, and it stayed out for days. Calling the previously exemplary customer support line yielded only an impersonal recording. The business office didn’t answer the phone at all. I was baffled, I was frustrated, and I was increasingly annoyed. What the hell could be going on?

I finally got my explanation, but not from ArosNet; Bill Gephardt, the local TV news consumer advocate, reported that he’d received dozens of calls asking if he could get to the bottom of the Aros mystery. It turned out that the company was relocating its physical data center to a larger office space in another part of the valley, and they’d experienced more problems getting everything back online than they’d anticipated.

Okay. That was a reasonable excuse, even if it was irresponsible and bad manners for them not to send out a mass email letting their customers know that this move was coming so we didn’t all panic when the lights went out. So to speak. Gephardt said the out of a few thousand customers, ArosNet had lost something like 800 due to the unannounced move. I decided to give the company the benefit of the doubt and stick with them a while longer, figuring that once they got all the bugs shaken out, everything would be fine again.

I’m so naive.

Service came back up, but I soon discovered that in the process of upgrading its back-end email software, Aros had managed to vaporize five years of saved messages that I’d never downloaded to my desktop PC. (I figured I didn’t really need to; isn’t everything supposed to be safer if it’s “out there” somewhere? That’s what “they” told us when the InterWebs were first coming into the spotlight.)

The final straw, though, was this month’s payment debacle. I was no longer so certain that I wanted to continue with ArosNet, but, me being me, I hadn’t yet gotten myself an alternative ISP before the bill came due. So I figured I pay for one more month to buy me some time while I figured out what I wanted to do.

I went to the Aros website, signed into my member account dashboard, and used the “pay online” feature. I received a pop-up note saying that it could take up to 24 hours before my account showed the payment — all standard procedure, right? Well, on a hunch, I checked my account the next day, just to be sure my money had gone through. I saw no sign that it had. So I tried calling the pleasant woman in accounting that I’d always dealt with before.

I got routed to tech support instead, but not the competent, eager tech support of days past. No, I ended up trying to explain my situation to the pimple-faced fast-food worker from The Simpsons. The kid put me on hold three times as he tried to figure out what the hell I was talking about. Finally, sensing my growing irritation, he promised me he wouldn’t put me on hold again; instead, he set the phone down on his desk while he went in search of somebody who actually knew something. Apparently, he also stopped by the restroom and went down the street to the Kwik-E-Mart for a Red Bull, because he left the phone sitting unattended for so long that the system finally dropped me. I’d been on the line with him for 40 minutes, and all I’d learned was that the ArosNet online payment mechanism wasn’t working. (Obvious question: why was the page still up, if it wasn’t working? Why hadn’t the company sent out a notice to its customers warning us of this little fact?)

Boiling now, I called back, got some other tech support drone, went through my explanation again, asked if I could speak to someone in accounting, or someone in charge, or someone that had been born prior to Kurt Cobain’s suicide. The drone said that I was panicking over nothing, that the system would email a renewal notice the same as it always had and I could pay then with no interruption in service.

The next day, I couldn’t get online. I’d been shut off. I’d never gotten any email notice.

Two days later, I received the email notice, forwarded on to my shiny new gmail account. Curious, I tried signing on — yep, sure enough, I’d been switched back on. It was at that moment that I rolled my eyes and decided to hell with ArosNet. The left hand obviously doesn’t know what the right is doing and I personally can’t handle any more flakiness. If anyone reading this also uses ArosNet as your ISP, I highly recommend that you get out now, while you still can. Before the body snatchers or brain-sucking leeches or whatever it was that destroyed this once-fine company learn how to start mind-wiping consumers as well.

I’m currently subsisting on the kindness of parents, friends, and employer for Internet access while I think about what to do next. I will probably just end up getting the DSL package offered by my telephone company — that seems to be the easiest, most economical solution in my area.

I hate it when my priniciples clash with convenience like this. It hurts my feelings when the little guys let me down. Especially when the whole situation seems so unnecessary; if someone had only managed this move a little more efficiently and communicated with the customers instead of trying to do everything under cover of darkness.

Damn body-snatching, brain-sucking leeches anyway…