Terror struck the Los Angeles area tonight as Adelphia cable subscribers were left… without cable.  Viewers throughout the Southland came home to their televisions, expecting to take in quality programming, like Lost, and downright crappy programming, like The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, but instead came away with fuzz, static and messages that the channels they wanted to watch were currently unavailable.

Local resident Keith was one of these stricken residents who attempted to make the best of things.  “Well, I freaked out for a couple of minutes because I really like Lost and my friend Paul rubbed it in over IM that he saw the East Coast feed thanks to DirecTV and that the episode was ‘awesome,’” he said.  “But after realizing that all of my other friends had Adelphia and there was no one I could call to record it for me, I just became resigned to the fact that I was going to have to miss tonight’s show.”

Adelphia, sadly, could do nothing to help any of these poor schmucks.  A call to their customer service line yielded a recorded message saying the company was aware of the outage and was working on restoring service to affected areas.  But some residents just couldn’t handle the outage.  “I had a couple of shows on TiVo that I could watch instead,” said Keith.  “But 9pm rolled around, and I heard my neighbors down the way turn on their TV and shriek when they were greeted with static.”

Service was restored around 9:45pm.  But it was too late—the damage had been done.  “My TiVo recorded the last 15 minutes of Lost,” Keith said.  “But honestly, if I watch that, I’ll just be more confused than I would be if I watched the whole episode, so I just deleted it.  What’s the use?” What’s the use, indeed.  Back to you in the newsroom.