By Tim Sanders

Let me say at the outset that I am not proud of this column.

I had planned on writing what would have been an excellent column about the importance of practice when it comes to nurturing talent which has long lain dormant. It involved a completely fictitious couple who lived in a small town nothing at all like Centre in a Southeastern state not even remotely resembling Alabama. This imaginary couple who was sitting at the dining room table (a table, by the way, which bore no resemblance to ours), had just finished a meal. The alleged husband was trying to impress his supposed wife with his ability to burp multisyllabic words like "pedestrian" and "lederhosen" after taking hefty sips of his carbonated beverage supplemented by large gulps of air. It was a talent he’d perfected in grade school many years earlier, much to his parents’ chagrin.

Sadly, the masterful, melodious recital ended abruptly when the purported husband aspirated a goodly quantity of Coca Cola down his windpipe and suffered a serious wheezing, honking and sneezing episode which resulted in at least a cupful of Coke spraying out of his nose. This nasally painful and extremely traumatic incident caused the non-existent wife, who should have been much more concerned with her husband’s health, to laugh until she aspirated her own root beer.

After a mad coughing, sputtering scramble to the kitchen sink, both of these fictional characters fell into a laughing fit. When the husband threatened to write an instructional column about the incident in a mythical paper in the illusory town in which the nonexistent couple lived, the purported wife demurred. She told her alleged husband in a very sweet, non-threatening way that if he were to write about the incident or link her in any way to such foolishness, she would move his bedclothes into their utility room, which, needless to say, bore no similarity to ours except that it also housed a lot of garden implements, including my chain saws, my weed eaters and my gas cans, which would make sleeping very uncomfortable.

So, since my wife agreed with the imaginary wife I’d made up in my own mind–the fictional one who aspirated her root beer–we’ll forget about the carbonated belching incident and instead talk about our Internet service, which we have recently upgraded. Yes, this will be a non-belching DSL column.

For several years now my wife and I have plodded along with a very adequate computer system, hampered only by an extremely slow dial-up Internet connection. Of course, to oldsters like us, waiting a few minutes to retrieve Internet information which would have taken us hours to research at the local library didn’t really seem all that inconvenient. We were blissfully unaware of just how slow our Internet connection was until friends and relatives commented on it. "If you had DSL," they’d say, "it wouldn’t take you hours to download the music, videos clips, and photo albums we send you!"

We decided we needed DSL, whatever it was.

Here is what we’ve learned about DSL:

1. I was wrong, DSL is not an acronym for "Diesel." That was an honest mistake anyone could have made. What DSL stands for is "broadband."

2. And "broadband" does not refer to an all-girl orchestra, either. No, broadband is a band in your phone line which is ... broad. I believe that your phone line contains both broad and narrow bands. Your broadband can supply Internet information to your computer faster than your narrow band, in the same way that your four-lane highway can allow traffic to flow faster than your little one-lane cow path.

3. For a nominal fee, your local phone company will send you a DSL kit, which will include several cables, some filters, a power cord and something called an Actiontec DSL Gateway box (at least that’s what ours is called). The box is a splendid contraption, with several official-looking blinking lights and an antenna. Any reasonably competent computer owner can install this equipment himself by following the simple instructions provided in Step 1 of the setup manual included in your DSL kit. You, on the other hand, will need to call somebody for help.

4. You will need help because a) you have a wall phone, which needs a special filter, b) the back of your computer doesn’t look anything like the one in the picture on page 6, and c) setup manuals give you a headache.

5. After calling the company and waiting on hold for an eternity, you find an automated voice which is programmed to answer any question anyone might possibly have except for the one you were going to ask. You finally hang up, figure it out yourself, drive to the phone company, and pick up that special filter for the wall phone. You would think you could then proceed with configuring your computer for DSL, but you aren’t exactly sure what configuring means.

6. You proceed anyway, but you forget whether you have signed up for simple Residential Service, Dynamic Business Service, or Static IP Service. All three options are mentioned in Step 2, which you will find on pages 9, 11, or 13, depending on which kind of computer system you have.

7. You study page 15, which contains your Residential configuring instructions. At the bottom of that page is a box with the message "This is the end of Step 3. Congratulations! You are now ready to surf the Web." That is encouraging, but you find you are unable, through no fault of your own, to complete the steps required to get you to the bottom of the page. You call the company again, and actually find a live person who is willing to talk to you. He transfers you to the office in Nepal, where all the technicians hang out. A technician named either Akbar or Barbar, you forget which, walks you through the configuration process. He assumes the tone of a kindergarten teacher advising a remedial student on the art of finger painting. He sighs several times, and says things like "click ‘Next,’ No, no, I say ‘Next!’ It is in the little box. Are you understanding me NOW?"

8. Eventually you are configured. Unfortunately, with broadband your phone can ring and telemarketers can annoy you even when you are on the Internet. And of course your wife can purchase items on eBay while simultaneously getting bidding advice from female relatives over the phone. That’s scary.

9. On the other hand, in nanoseconds you can now download an excellent Internet rendition of Lionel Soames belching the entire first verse of "Indian Love Call," accompanied by 1940s armpit virtuoso Ziggy Fiedler.

Not that I would be interested in anything like that personally, mind you.