Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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I got a call from my friend Jimbo. "I read about your problems installing Dial Up Networking in Windows 98," he said. "I had no idea you were so dumb."

"Dumb?" I asked, my nostrils flaring intelligently. "Me?"

"Yeah. All you have to do is install Dial Up Networking in Settings-Control Panel. I do it all the time. Works like a charm."

My nostrils stopped flaring. Sure, I'm dumb. But not that dumb -- although I grant these things are hard to quantify, and how dumb you are is a critical variable when your system is down, as mine was.

I had just spent two and a half hours on tech support to Microsoft in Seattle, and I knew the solution was not as simple as Jimbo's.

First I tried calling Microsoft's regular tech support, the one that's free with new purchases. But that line was busy for three full days. Finally I decided to opt for the $35 Pay Per Incident help line. I'm glad I did.

A man named Mike Edmonds came on after the first ring, and he was every techno-torture victim's dream of a helping hand. He was systematic, inexhaustible, and linear as a laser -- all the qualities I lacked. He led me through a series of five solutions to my inability to connect to the Internet, and along the way I learned many things about Windows 98. Like its System File Checker, that finds compressed files on your Win98 disk that are missing on your system or otherwise scrozzled.

My problem was that every time I dialed, I got a message saying "ESSENTIAL FILE MISSING; REINSTALL DIAL-UP NETWORKING." It never said what the file was, and reinstalling the utility, regardless of what Jimbo said, was no help.

The workarounds Mike led me through progressed from simple to more complex. Each time we removed Dial-Up Networking more thoroughly, digging more deeply into the inner goulash of Windows 98. Each time we had to sit through a lengthy reboot, during which we made small talk.

I asked Mike how he managed to stay so calm, when people like me were so anxious.

"We can't be in a hurry. We'll solve your problem no matter how long it takes."

My guess is that Microsoft staffs its $35-a-call number (the charge shows up automatically on your long distance bill) more generously than its non-$35 number. Go figure.

Then I asked if he was on drugs, to make him so calm. I suggested that if there was a drug that could do that, Microsoft might be advised to get out of software altogether and just sell that drug, because I'd rather feel like that than the way I felt usually about Microsoft. But no, Mike insisted, no drugs were involved. Like, what was he going to say.

I asked him what proportion of problems he could solve from experience, or did Microsoft "protocolize" the process, so he was essentially reading from a script. The former, he told me. "We're like a lab here. Lots of our calls are first-time events. We like to learn about them right away, so we can help the next person with that problem."

Then I said, what do you do when a caller is really dumb? I mean beyond-the-pale dumb, rotting-fencepost dumb. How do you talk that user down? Mike agreed that was a problem, but they tried to work with everyone. If anything, he was a little too diplomatic on this point, because my nostrils started flaring again. I have no control over them.

My theory is that the mega-dumb have problems dialing the 900 number. I didn't.

Anyway, none of Mike's first six interventions worked. Then Mike found a technical note saying that users who delete 1996-era versions of Compuserve's software can cause disruptions to their connecting ability. Guess what: I deleted an old version of Compuserve the day my computer became sullen and incommunicative.

There was an elaborate workaround for this problem. We had to go into Windows Registry -- the place that is so sensitive and so unforgiving that even Microsoft posts warning signs around it -- and start mucking around.

At this point Mike was like one of those emergency air control guys who talk a 5-year-old into landing a Boeing 777 on the roof of an office tower. I had to rename thirty system drivers and delete entire folders. One slip, an L instead of a 1, and my system was creamed beef on toast. He read the instructions to me one character at a time, and I executed them and read them back to him the same way.

It was a harrowing experience. But you should have heard Mike on the other end after the next reboot, and Dial Up Networking successfully connected to my ISP. "Hey!" he shouted, as happy to fix the thing as I was.

It was one of those lifeboat-in-the-Pacific situations. We had suffered together, and shared seagull. Now we were rescued, and protocol dictated that I would thank him and hang up, and we would resume to our regularly scheduled programs.

In a better world, it would have been Miller Time.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.