I’ve been having trouble with my internet service for weeks. I would like to claim that’s why I haven’t written anything, but that would be a lie. I’ll confess all in the next post. Right now, I’m having terrible internet connection problems. They are seriously interfering with this hot, online affair I’m having. But I wasn’t going to talk about that.

I’ve had my computer in and out of the shop, hoping that there was something -- software, card -- that could be fixed so I could get online reliably. Well, no quick fix, as it turned out, but I found out my motherboard is dying, so all that money I spent wasn’t a total loss. We installed a new router, which transmits an "excellent" signal with no data in it. It’s a start, I suppose. The computer repairman gently delivered the bad news: "You have to call your service provider."

There are few things in life that I hate and fear as much as calling outsourced customer service, but my internet service was off more than it was on and I had tried everything else. So day before yesterday, I called AT&T and spoke with "Bruce" in India. The conversation went like this:

"Now, Ms. Lake, what is the phone number for the service?"

"415-555-8822"

"All right. Now, Ms. Lake, I’m going to check your service."

"Ok."

"Ok, Ms. Lake, I checked your service. I see you have the "Home" service.

"Whatever, it’s not working."

"Ms. Lake, what kind of modem do you have?"

"Speedstream."

"Ms. Lake, will you please turn off the power to the modem, then turn it back on?"

"Look, can you stop saying ‘Ms. Lake’ over and over? I know someone trained you to think that Americans love hearing the sound of their own name, but you’re over-doing it."

"Ok, Sirenita, will you please turn off the power to the modem, then turn it back on?"

"Look, Bruce, which is not even your name, please just say what you have to say and stop repeating my name. I know my name and by now, so do you. Can you focus on the problem with my service, please?"

"Fine, Sirenita. My name is Bruce."

Eventually, having sufficiently tortured the hapless Bruce with my cynicism and despair, I determined that a service upgrade was available. I think AT&T is running a scam. What was perfectly good service a year ago is so painfully slow, especially at peak hours, that you are forced to upgrade. Still, there is something to having a faster connection for $5 more a month (and is that the real price or the introductory offer?) so, what the hell. I put in an order. The upgrade is supposed to happen sometime today.

Last night, I swore to finish a project I was working on. I do not have a single gene for discipline, but I learned in my youth to grit my teeth and make myself finish things. At one time, it was possible to mistake me for a responsible, hard-working person. Those days are over. I tend to work best in the wee hours, but by 1:00 a.m., I had enough of my tedious project.

I’m gonna read me some OS, I thought. Tried to start a browser. Internet not working at all. After 20 minutes of "you’re connected, no, ha ha, you’re not connected" messages from my computer, I dialed the tech support number again. Got a a girl, this time in the Philippines, who asked the same series of questions, even though the answers were in the file. Then she added a new one "What kind of computers do you have?"

I said, "One Mac and three PCs."

She said, "Oh I have to transfer you to a Mac expert."

I hollered, "No! The Mac is not the problem, your service is the problem. Get me a second tier engineer!"

A sympathetic customer service rep in the U.S. had once told me the magic words, "second tier." The outsourced and clueless first line tech support reps will never offer to move you along to someone who actually knows something, but if you say "second tier," you get an American who may actually help you.

(Full disclosure: my job went to India and they are welcome to it. However, I doubt the company replaced me with anyone as good at my job as I was. I was a tech writer, for God’s sake. There are standards in tech writing for the American market and they are American standards. It’s not the same as writing code, which is no one’s native language.)

So a guy named Alex, whose real name is Alex and who sounds black and sexy so I know he didn’t just take accent lessons, comes on the line. I feel the lessening of tension that comes from reaching the right person, someone who’s smart and understands every word I say. Sadly, even Alex wanted me to go through the turning off and on the modem ritual, which apparently must be done to appease the gods of tech support each and every time you call.

"Is this really necessary? That’s already been checked. It’s late and if I go where the modem is, I’ll disturb someone." I didn’t mention that "someone" was the cat. My new friend Alex insisted that I had to clear the modem’s memory. I snuck into the cats’ room. The cats have their own room because my husband is allergic to cats. He can tolerate them as long as they stay out of the bedroom. At night, the cats go into their room so our bedroom door can stay open. The two cats were snuggled in their chair, which looked really nice, and I hoped that they would just go back to sleep. I hoped Milagrito would go back to sleep, that is. If there is trouble to be made, Milagrito will make it. But he just blinked sleepily at me.

I slid out of their room, having restarted the modem, and went back to the computer. Now Alex wanted me to power down the router. I was already half in love with Alex and his reassuring voice, but another foray into the cats’ room? I’d been in out of the cats’ room once without losing a cat, and now I needed to go in there again? Milagrito would take that as an invitation to party. I had no choice, so I went.

Why does every little thing around here involve cat drama?

This time Milagrito was ready for me. He did his famous through-the-legs maneuver and dodged out of his room and into our bedroom. An allergen run amok in the bedroom! I yelled, "Oh shit! Hold on!" to Alex and went pounding after the cat, repeating "Sorry! Please hold on!" to Alex, who wisely said nothing. I ran into the bedroom and couldn’t see the cat, who’s black, so naturally I had to turn on the light. Mark bolted upright in bed. We live in a lively neighborhood. Mark knows if he’s woken up in the middle of the night, there might be serious shit going on. Once I woke him up because a rat got mangled in the treadmill while I was trying to catch the cats and put them to bed, but that’s a different story.

I said to Mark, who was squinting in the light, "I’ve got tech support on the line and the cat's in the bedroom!" He gave me that look of bewilderment seasoned with a dash of deer in the headlights. Life with me stamps that look on a man’s face. I ran around the bedroom for a minute, saying "Hold on! Hold on!" into the phone. The cat will let you pick him up anywhere, including outside, but he runs from you like the scofflaw he is when he gets into the bedroom. He knows he’s not supposed to be there and he turns in to a fugitive. Finally I chased him out and he ran in the kitchen.

I was able to shut the door on him. Alex, still on the line, said gently, "Let me check on your system from this end." There are other tricks you can try with the customer’s equipment, but I think he had learned his lesson. Does it seem that I'm always chasing cats while talking to people on the phone? It does to me.

Alex said he found a lot of page "time-outs" and he would do a "rip and reboot" (which totally sounds like it’s from The Wire, endearing him further to me) on my system. The internet came up, and I thanked him profusely and hung up. I was online for about an hour. Then it quit. And I had to call again. The young man, in America this time, said, "What kind of modem do you have?" and I snapped, "Open a case! I’m not doing this again!" The wise customer service rep knows when they have a madwoman on the line. He opened a tech support case, gave me the reference number, and got off the phone as quickly as possible.