It started out as a normal day. I was working merrily along, thinking all was right in my phone-booth world, and then–ding-dong–trouble came calling. My wireless router went kaput. Sigh.

That bites.

As disasters go, I’ll take it and consider myself lucky, but this little hiccup sucked at least 2 hours out of my day and my life. First I had to monkey with the whole setup to convince myself the problem was indeed in the router. I changed cords, changed modems, bypassed the router. All signs pointed to the router being kaput.

It’s less than a year old, so I figured it was under warranty, but to know for certain, I had to find the paperwork. I keep those kinds of things “organized” in 3 places. It wasn’t in any of those places. It’s been a bad year for paperwork, I’m afraid. It seems I was actually more organized when we moved every 6-8 months, which we did until 2004. Now that I have a house and places to put things (sort of), instead of a storage unit and plastic tubs, I’m worse at keeping track of stuff. Go figure. It took a while, but I found what I needed.

The instructions said I had to call the manufacturer’s tech support. Agent 1386, for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language, put me and the router through a lengthy series of tests. She finally concluded that the router was kaput. I was tempted to say, “I told you so,” but we were having enough trouble communicating without sarcasm and throw-away comments.

So now I have to mail the router to the manufacturer and they will replace it. In the meantime, I’ve moved the couch and a table and blocked the path from my desk to the kitchen so that the laptop can connect to the internet via a too-short wire. The good news is I’ll get more exercise in the next 2 weeks walking the extra 12 steps from my desk to the kitchen.

I learned some things, anyway. That’s always good. I just wish I’d dusted while I was crawling around the wire jungle under the desk. I guess I’ll do that when the new router arrives.