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My cable modem connection has not been working since about 10 am yesterday. I have intermittent problems with the service, but generally rebooting the modem or sheer patience will bring back my phat pipe, but by 5pm yesterday it was clear the connection wasn't coming back.

I called the tech support folks at AOL-Time Warner, who adminster connectivity issues, although I am ostensibly an Earthlink subscriber. After telling me to check the physical connection on all of the cables, the tech support woman said there was nothing she could do remotely and scheduled me for a service call between 10am and 7pm Monday. Of course I am annoyed because I'll have no broadband over the weekend and I have to wait as long as nine hours on Monday for some schlub to do ten minutes worth of work.

Before I got off the phone, I asked the woman, "Is there a local number that I can use for dial-up in the interim?"

Not realizing that I'm an Earthlink subscriber, she informed me, "Oh, you need to get online and go to the Road Runner homepage, and look up a number there. We can't give out dial-up numbers over the phone."

"Um, let me get this straight. My cable modem is working, so I need to use a dial-up connection to get online. But in order to set up a dial-up connection, I need to get online."

"That's correct. Oh, that is pretty stupid."

"Um, yeah. Like, no one in management thought that through?"

She didn't offer to let me speak to a manager, and I didn't feel like pressing the issue, so I just hung up.

This afternoon, I got online at the RTF graduate student lab in loverly UA9, and got a local Earthlink access number, so I now I'm surfing the Internet, 1995-style.