The Curmudgeonly Professor's Ten Most Egregious Mistakes of 2008: Mistake Number 4

By and large, the Curmudgeonly Professor faithfully followed the maxim "Every day in every way I am doing better and better."  However, occasionally a bit of slippage, intended or unintended, occurred to put a cloud over this goal and to cast a few demerits on the water, so to speak.  Mistake Number 4 occurred in trusting the LinkSys wireless router company to actually make a router that would work for more than a year, or to make a new router that I didn't have to send back.  All of this saga plunged the Curmudgeonly Professor into tech support hell for hours and hours, raising his blood pressure and encouraging him to swear off electronic gadgetry and go back to paper and pencil, or perhaps even ball-point pen.  Now the Professor continues to be skeptical that anything will work, or that it will work for long if it works to begin with, or that anyone can fix it if it quits working, or that the extended warranty will not cost more than the gizmo cost to begin with, or that he can understand more than one or two words spoken by tech support people from the far corners of the globe.   He even suggested to the LinkSys people that they institute some basic quality control procedures and find some tech support people one can understand.  One can always dream.