DONGLE NO

So, the phone line in my flat is not active. I hate BT with a burning vengeance, which is unfortunate as I would need to pay them to get the line switched on and then be tied into an 18-month contract with this stupid, stupid company and its terrible outsourced customer service for all that time. Considering that I tend to move every two seconds, this isn't so much a good idea.

Next door has Virgin Broadband. I could go in and peek at their router, if I didn't hate The Girl Who Sneezes Loudly in the Bathroom Every Single Hour of the Night so much. So that's out.

My final resort was the USB dongle and for £20, it wasn't so bad. I picked a stupid first-time plan which amounts to £10 for 1024mbs. I watched ten minutes of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on Youtube, only to panic when it swallowed up 300mbs of data. But you live and learn - the plan is simple: only use this for browsing and e-mails. Use Youtube and chat and all those other wonderful things during a weekend or something when I am at my parents' house.

Fine.

Except that this dongle really, really likes not working. It keeps insisting there is no signal even when it is flashing one (yes, I checked out the area - it's very well-covered by this network). It tries to uninstall itself. There is no modem! Wait, wait... there is. Except the computer doesn't like it. It can't connect, it can, it can't.

The worst thing is that it chooses the most stupid times to play up. For instance, I am off work today. If I really needed the internet, I could go to my parents' house, or the library, or the local pub with free wifi. The dongle has decided today is a good day to work.

What the dongle does hate, I have found, is Sundays. Now, early morning access on a Sunday is important to me. Everyone seems to be about and I post drabble prompts to vc_media, the sexy Vampire Chronicles community saffronlie and I run (it's a fun place! Why haven't you checked it out?), so of course, the dongle chooses to go asleep at this time.

This weekend, it allowed me to post. And then cut me off as I posted my own drabble response. Cue hours of frustrated headdesking, biting the dongle at one low point and eventually giving up and going to see my parents. Of course, I didn't explain that I hadn't so much come to see them as to read and post 100-word stories about vampires, but that's okay.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying I HATE THIS DONGLE and sorry to community followers and MSN/Yahoo types, particularly saffronlie,  who waits like some acerbic Penelope for me on chat, not knowing that Circe 3 Mobile has decided it's sacrilege for me to be online on Sunday.

But more than that, can anybody help? How do I make this thing act consistently without threatening it? And don't tell me to call their tech support. It is, predictably, an 0845 number. Even BT is looking good right now. :(