My DSL modem decided to give up the ghost while I was working at home today. It took a few hours to figure out that I wasn’t having a temporary line drop out since the front panel lights and the back hub lights were flashing with the network cables unplugged. A phone call to tech support declared the modem R.I.P. after I plugged the power brick directly into the wall instead of the power strip and the lights stopped flashing. Maybe the power brown out from this summer shortened its life cycle.

That’s a bad situation when working from home without a fast Internet connection. Running four or five help desk applications over a slow dial-up connection wasn’t an option. So I hiked over to the library at San Jose City College to plug my laptop into their network and continued working for the rest of the day.

I ordered the business class DSL modem from AT&T since it had the same price as my deceased consumer class DSL modem and looked sturdier. The website required Internet Explorer since AT&T hadn’t caught on that there are other web browsers, forcing me to boot into Windows on my MacBook. The joys of being a telecommuter in Silicon Valley.