To continue an earlier post of astonishing importance, the DSL connection is back up here at Infospigot corporate HQ. All it involved was about an hour on the phone to India, an actual service call here at our Berkeley premises to confirm that our line was OK (it was), and the chance discovery that our provider, SBC, had actually changed the log-in required to connect to its network. Once I discovered this last fact — which was not advertised in advance, so far as I can tell, but was mentioned in a recorded service announcement I heard when I called the company for help — it was just a matter of figuring out what our account’s actual user name and password were. Thanks to Kate’s diligent retention of notes I made on our account about six or seven months ago, I realized at about Hour 54 of the Great DSL Crisis that the name and password were totally different from the ones I had been trying and trying and trying, in lab-monkey fashion, since Thursday.
"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."