"Now, ma'am, I must ask you please..."

"...would you be seeing a cable that is connected to your computer and to your modem, thank you?"

I can't get that sentence out of my head. Probably because I heard it about ten times last night in an absolutely worthless 15-minute phone call to Verizon DSL Tech Support. Let me warn you, if you call Verizon DSL Tech Support and get a girl named "Lanie", HANG UP IMMEDIATELY!!!!

Not only would she not listen to me explain my problem and therefore walked me through several exercises in futility, she was rude, kept speaking in a foreign language to people in the background without muting her microphone, asked the cable question enough to make me want to crawl through the phone line and do ugly things with the bright yellow Ethernet wire (which was FIRMLY attached to both computer and modem as it should have been), and finally told me "well, as you can see, we have done all we can, so your problem is obviously in your computer and you'll have to call Dell to have them resolve it". Not really sure why I waited that long to hang up on her, but I did at that point.

My desktop computer is old and slow and takes forever to load pages--I explained that to her upfront, but apparently she hears English even more poorly than she speaks it. At one point, she asked me to restart my computer and, when *she* thought it should be rebooted, she started firing off instructions to me about what to do next. I interrupted her and told her that it was still shutting down and she did this exasperated "Oh, my God!" thing and started asking me every ten seconds if it was restarted yet. (That was the point at which she was also talking very loudly in another language to people in the background--sounded like they were having a party in the room). I could just see her rolling her eyes and tapping her fingers while she waited with absolutely NO patience, because I was keeping her from something really important. (Wait a minute--isn't she "tech support"? Doesn't she get paid for helping me, no matter how long it takes to reboot my computer?)

Maybe she gets paid for the number of times she asks if I can see a yellow cable connected to my computer at one end and my modem at the other...if so, she surely scored a bonus on my call!! Honestly, I have never been treated more poorly by a customer service/tech support person anywhere--she was rude, condescending, AND didn't know what she was doing (had me uninstall my NIC and then told me to close out the installation "wizard" when it popped up, because I didn't need it). And she gave me that "you are really annoying me" sigh way too many times.

So, I called back today and got a really nice man named Paul. I told him upfront "before you ask, my yellow Ethernet cable is attached to my computer AND my modem and please don't ask me a dozen times to make sure I can see it". He laughed. I told him exactly what my problem was and that I had fixed it before, but had lost my written instructions on what to do after I hit the reset button on my router. He said "no problem, ma'am, we'll have that fixed in just a few minutes", walked me through it step by step, without doing anything completely useless (and without one question about my Ethernet cable!) I told him several times how much I appreciated his helpfulness and good manners--he never once spoke remotely condescendingly to me. There ARE good people out there in Verizon Tech Support land.

I still don't have wireless for some reason...I've done everything I know to try to fix that, so I have to call back tomorrow and work on the next problem. Technology, unless it's working the way it's supposed to work, just doesn't mesh too well with me.

And I STILL haven't found that missing wireless router...