Plus, thanks to my comfort with technology, I am able to run a business from home, enabling me to be with my kids when necessary and causing me to work all sorts of weird hours.

Because I feel in my milieu when cybering, I tend not to crack the binding of a technical manual. I’ve never been able to become adept with Adobe Illustrator because I refused to read past page four. If I can’t figure it out by poking around – clicking here, clicking there – then I give up and move on to the next great invention.

However, while I am comfortable with technology, I am not a computer whiz. My teenage daughter can text with lightening speed, while I give up with the first punctuation mark (re-read the above passage about my refusing to check the manual). Thus, if I am in severe meltdown and need actually to pick up the phone (not my favorite mode of communication) and call technical service, I have pretty much done everything in my own power to trouble shoot the problem.

Recently, I was having Internet “issues,” meaning I could not connect to the Internet. I knew the problem was with my modem, because the little light was blinking. Modems aren’t supposed to blink (although, considering the singularity of my modem light, “wink” would be a more accurate description of what modems should never do).

So, glaring at my winking modem, I picked up the dreaded telephone and dialed the much loathed 800 number.

When I say I don’t like the telephone as a mode of communication, the reason is simple: I prefer to reserve my phone for people with whom I actually like to converse. The problem in today’s multi-connected world is that if you are dialing a business, you don’t get a person on the other end. Instead, you get a computer.

And the worst kind of computers is one with voice recognition. Or, to be more accurate, voice non-recognition. You have to know that a man invented voice recognition software. A man who lives alone. A man who lives alone in a vacuum completely devoid of sound.

As soon as the woman on the phone (I believe that the majority of computer voices are female because the powers that be think you’re less likely to curse at a female computer) asks me to speak my number, I’m doomed. She can never understand my voice over the screams of my son, the music of my daughter, the television in the next room, the dog barking, the UPS guy ringing the bell, my fax machine buzzing and my other phone line ringing in at that precise moment.

Did I mention how lucky I am to work from home?

So, from that first effort of attempting to state my phone number, I am navigating the uncertain waters of voice mail purgatory. It may be minutes, it may be hours, it may be forty days and nights before the cyber-lady on the other end of the line gives up attempting to decipher my garbled code and connects me to an actual, live, breathing human. And the wait is interminable.

When I finally get the human on the line, they are perplexed by my anger and frustration and the conversation rarely goes well.

Personally, I think there should be a special geek bypass number that gets me through to a customer service rep without the voice mail maze of horror. Because all I really want is my Internet back up and running so I can get back to work.