Internetless

I've been staying with my parents this week and trying to get them connected to the internet. First of all, it's amazing how cut off from everything I am when I'm deprived of easy internet access in my home. It's actually suprisingly anxiety-producing after a few days. Second, my parents decided that they would prefer to get high-speed access through their cable company. It has been quite a hassle to make this happen. Though the cable company sent us a modem in a timely manner, everything else about getting the service started has been a terrible hassle. They seem to be completely incapable of activating our service properly, and everything has gone wrong, including technicians failing to complete the necessary paperwork properly and several customer service representatives and technical support people telling me drastically different things. This is especially frustrating because I'm pretty certain I've done everything right on my end. I've tried everything possible to avoid spending an extra $100 for an installation service call. I seem to remember that we had some trouble self-installing our own cable internet service at our apartment in LA - is this a problem other people have had? Does the self-installation usually work as easily as it should?