I have been on the World Wide Web for about twelve years now, and just got high speed DSL. Hard to believe, I know, but I live in a very rural community and it took the geniuses at the telephone company a long while to discover our existence. Anyway, the big day arrived and I was told by my sales rep that in order to have both mine and my husband’s computers on DSL, I would need a network card. Hey, no problem!

I went to Best Buy to make the simple purchase, but upon arrival, discovered there were 73 different types from which to choose. Since I can no longer read fine print, I cornered a salesman who was idly staring at the display shelves.

“Excuse me, I was told I need a network card. Which one would you suggest?” I asked sweetly.

“Well, it depends. Does your receiver have an antenna?” I had no clue. I called my brother in law who had the receivers at his house since UPS won’t come down our mountain road. “Open it up, is there an antenna?”

“Yes, there is an antenna,” he reported.

“Well, then, you will either need to connect your two computers with a Ethernet cable or have them both on the network card, or one of each.”

Huh? Nothing about an Ethernet cable had been previously discusses with my sales rep.

“Okay, I’m not buying two network cards at sixty bucks each, so let’s go with the cable.”

“What length?”

Geez! How the heck do I know? “Well, it’s certainly not 15′ between our computers. Let’s go with the seven footer.”

I picked up the receiver at my brother in-law’s and headed home, jubilant – this was going to be so great! The service wouldn’t be connected until 5pm, so I started organizing my desk for the operation. For some reason, computer manufacturers think it’s a good idea to make the connection board completely inaccessible without serious contortions of the human body. I took out the receiver, hooked up the connections with the cables they supplied. Their Ethernet cable was too short – 3 feet for God’s sake! I needed to place the receiver halfway between my computer and my husband’s which was about 5 feet for each of us. Lucky I had that 7 footer now.

I waited until five o’clock and having completely disconnected my computer, moved it from my desk to the floor, I began the mind-boggling process of reconnecting the old cable and all of the new cables. Voila! It was at least running. Then I opened the 2 feet by 3 feet sheet of instructions. I began working through the directions step-by-step – I clicked the browser button – nothing. Then I found the support phone number in fine print hidden in an obscure location on the back of the box. A short while and many verifications later (how old was your childhood dog when she was first vaccinated? Where was she buried? What was the town of your mother in law’s birth? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?) I was actually speaking to a real live tech type guy.

Amazingly, he took me through the steps so quickly, assigned me an account and had me off and running in about ten minutes. What a guy! I was so excited I hung up and clapped my hands with joy – prematurely. I didn’t even use the ISP he connected me with. I had no idea how to configure my previous email accounts. I called support again and got a nasally voice connected to an Indian – East Indian. This must be what they mean by outsourcing. He was clueless, mostly unintelligible and generally hapless. I thanked him and hung up. Okay, I realized, this was not going to be easy.

But, surprisingly, the next call I made was to the support people at
Linksys, the manufacturer of the network card. The woman had me up and connected in no time, my pages loaded at lightening speed and it only took us about 3 weeks to stop extolling the virtues of DSL and get back to work.