I’m a jinx.

That’s the only explanation.

You heard my story about my problems with my car. I may have mentioned that I just had to mail off my PowerBook because there were an insane amount of stuck pixels on the display. On top of the random stuff at work (like my computer spontaneously restarting), we just had another weird failure. On Thursday night, our phone stopped working. On Friday, it hadn’t come back yet, so I called up Pac Bell (once again) and once again, the problem was fixed on their end automatically.

Unfortunately, this time when they fixed the voice line, the DSL stopped working… even though it was working while the voice line was off. This started another nightmare of Tech Support that has bounced me within different divisions of Pac Bell / SBC Global, each thinking it’s the other’s department until I finally get someone who tries to piece together exactly what happened.

So, we’ve been without DSL for three days and counting, and from what I gather from the last person I talked to, probably at least one more. Oddly, though, the IP address of our DSL modem (which shouldn’t be online, as it’s been sitting in the room trying to sync with the DSL for the last three days) is actually responding to pings. Whether or not that’s our actual modem, or someone else’s DSL modem that got assigned the same IP will be determined tonight by some of my own “diagnostic tests”.