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THE LAND OF DSL

My wife normally goes through the mail. The reason for this is simple. Bills depress me. Thus, I deal with them by pitching them in a drawer and not looking at them, thereby keeping a chipper mood.

My wife has deemed this is an inefficient manner in which to pay for such luxuries as electricity and has commandeered the household mail routing. So I never know what's coming in the mail. The only piece of mail I can even recognize is Sports Illustrated. But the other day, my wife came to me and handed me an envelope from our phone company. Instinctively, I pitched it behind the toaster.

"What have we talked about, young man?" she asked.

I dutifully retrieved and opened it. I saw pages and pages of ... stuff. Phone stuff. Long distance stuff. All kinds of stuff that, quite frankly, bored me.

"Neat," I said, handing it back to her, thinking that some toast sounded pretty good.

"Keep reading," she said.

I turned the page. Then I saw the bait she was dangling in front of me: DSL. For those of you without computer savvy, DSL stands for ... something ... and it is basically a super fast Internet connection. I have wanted DSL for a long time but had decided that it was not really worth the added expense. And by "decided" I mean "had decided for me by the Mail Commandant."

My wife explained that the phone company had an offer that combined our regular phone service, cellular phone service, long distance and DSL for one flat monthly fee. And when we did the math 10 or 12 times, we discovered that the flat fee would be WAY less than the combined total we were currently shelling out for our various communication services. Being a spaz, I immediately grabbed the phone and went to order. My wife, thinking ahead, had disconnected the phone from the wall.

She, apparently, had decided we had some minor issues we had to wade through before we proceeded, such as checking to see if there were any hidden costs, making sure we could cancel our current Internet and cellular services, and having me sign a release agreeing to no more than 14 hours on the Internet per day.

Now, before you remind me that just last week I wrote a column about how I messed up my computer by trying to improve it, let me remind you of something: I do not learn lessons. Ever. I'm thick when it comes to comeuppance.

After investigating the issue further, we determined that the deal was, in fact, as good as it seemed. We agreed to make the switch, and in only a couple of days received our DSL equipment. The next morning, I offered to get up with the children so that my wife could sleep in. While you may applaud my chivalry, I was actually banking on her staying asleep long enough to let me try and install DSL on my own. If my wife were awake during the installation session, she would pester me with such annoyances as actually unpacking the shipping box and reading the directions. She probably would also not have enlisted a 3-year-old as a helper, thereby avoiding conversations like this:

ME: Allie, hand me the USB cable. ALLIE! That's an ethernet cable! I said the USB cable!!!

ALLIE: Daddy, please let me watch my cartoons.

After only a few minor hiccups and in surprisingly short time, I was ready to give the DSL a whirl. I clicked on the Internet browser, expecting my computer to either (a) give me an error message (b) freeze up or (c) explode. To my amazement, it instead zipped onto the Internet at lightning speed.

I clicked a page here and a page there and realized I was in a world previously unknown in my paltry dial-up universe. If DSL is a Corvette, regular old dial-up is a dog-sled carrying George Foreman and pulled uphill by squirrels.

So I am having gobs of fun having screaming-fast Internet. And I get the added bonus of actually saving money each month. It's like a deal that seems too good to be true, but then isn't. Or something. I can't believe the world of possibilities that awaits with my DSL service. I can search anything I want and not be bogged down my network clogs. Imagine the things I can find on my new hyper-fast internet. I may actually finally find out what DSL stands for.