The Park Regency hotel (1710 Prospector Ave., Park City, Utah) has always had weak, spotty, sluggish wifi. It’s 2013 and it still feels like 1997 in this joint. And last night the wifi was moving like a snail in suite #202. So I asked this morning if I could please have a suite that’s closer to the router/modem, and they said sure and gave me the keys to suite #232, where I’m now sitting. And it’s even slower. It’s awful. Pages takes minutes, not seconds, to load. It took so long for my gmail page to load that I went into a dumb-beast trance. There’s nothing worse than bad-wifi headaches. The forehead throbs.

The last time the wifi was this bad was four years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, where the first Hollywood Elsewhere “mood pocket” occured.

I’ve tried to sign up for a mifi service via AT&T but it’ll take days to receive the device in the mail. I can’t do the good old “turn your phone into a mifi device” because in order to do this I’ll have to give up my AT&T international plan, according to two AT&T tech guys I spoke with.

Update: I’ve asked the Park Regency staffers for assistance in a moderate but urgent tone of voice, and they basically stared at me like I’m a circus freak, like I’m crazy and possibly dangerous. Could you please call QWest and ask for a service guy to come out and see what’s wrong? It was like talking to cows. All they do is say “uhm, could you maybe work in the lobby? Because the signal is pretty good here.” (Which it is.) As a last resort I wrote the guy in charge of running this place, Richard Zimmerman of Trading Places, and of course he’s not responding. Why would he?

Instructions for the crazy guy in room #232: Nod, listen, say you’re sorry, keep nice-ing him and wearing him down. He’ll eventually give up. And the staffers are right. They’ve won and I’ve lost. I’m now filing from the lobby. Tail between legs. But somewhat grateful. It works like gangbusters down here! What a contrast!

Update: But it still sucks back in the suite. I brought both of my Macbook Pros plus the iPad 3 on this trip. For whatever reason the Macbook Pro sitting on a table in front of the couch works a little better than the computer sitting on the desk in front of the TV. I guess between the moody couch computer and the lobby sessions I’ll muddle through, but I hate this.