"DSL Synch Light is steady green, Houston. Er, Manila."

So this afternoon I could not connect to the Internet. I use an Airport base station, so I checked my wireless connection. It was fine. My modem lights read normal. I did the usual: turned off the modem, turned off the Airport, rebooted my machine. I did this several times. I also tried connecting directly to my modem using the Ethernet cable. Nothing. I had to go to Helena's party, so I left it for later. I also wondered whether the recent storms had anything to do with this.

I came home to the same trouble. I had my browser run a diagnostic, and it showed that everything was fine but I just wasn't connecting to the net or my ISP server. Hmmm.

I gave in and called tech support. I got a young man from some distant, semi-tropical country who had me unplug my modem, re-plug it, ditto for the Airport. Then he asked me to reboot my machine.

I reached for the track pad to do this when a website appeared in my browser window.

"OK. I know you are not going to believe me, because you deal with stupid people all day," I told the man. "But everything we just did? I did them all about five times earlier today with zero results. And now? It's working. So really, the thing I need to do, apparently, is have you on the phone while I do these things, because now everything is working fine."

Does anyone else experience this? I mean, seriously, I turn things off, wait, turn them on; nothing. I do this a half-dozen times, knowing that this is the best step. I do this for every piece of equipment, with no result. But one call to tech support, and suddenly some mojo from Bangalore flies through the phone line and all of my equipment sits up and pays attention.

And I KNOW this will happen, and that I will look like a moron, no matter how much I protest that I really, really, really did do these thing over and over before calling and wasting their time.

I can tell they don't believe me.