My Wife, the Super Genius

As many of you know, I have dialup internet access at home. Lately, my connection speeds have been steadily dropping. Normally I connect at around 28.8 – I am a long way from my exchange – but it started degrading, dropping to 20, and then 14.4, eventually bottoming out at around 10. Holy Smokes, that’s slow – even by my tortoise-like standards.

I was full of theories as to what the problem was – my ISP was trying to push me to finally accept the monthly hit for DSL, or my purchase of a $10 modem was coming back to haunt me. I downloaded drivers and made sure my account was in good standing, but I just couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

In what seemed to be a separate development, last Monday Katy told me she thought the static on our phone line had gotten worse. She called Pacific Bell and they dispatched a technician. He found a bad splice in our line – actually an unnecessary bad splice – which he promptly fixed, removing the static from our phone and miraculously bringing my connection speeds back up.

Oh.