Last weekend I confidently told the guy helping me at Best Buy I didn't need one of their geeks to come to my house to set up the wireless router I was purchasing. No siree, I could figure it out on my own because:
A. I'm too cheap to pay someone to hook something up at my house.
B. I think I'm more technically savvy than I really am.

It started out simple, so I thought. Hook up a router to the modem so I can use my work laptop anywhere in the house instead of being tethered to the modem whenever I want to connect to The Saratogian's network. With wireless successfully operational throughout the house, we could then connect our Wii gaming system to the Internet and order Netflix movies through it. It all sounded so blissful.

But here I am, many hours invested and days later, with a tangle of cords and wires, a new router shoved back in the box and stowed under the printer table and no wireless Internet connection anywhere in the house.

Those who know me well can attest I don't give up easily. But after spending my entire Saturday evening connecting this to that, rebooting and rebooting again, and even live chatting online with "Hetan" from the router company (until he instructed me to do something that disconnected me from the Internet), I kinda packed it in for lack of any new ideas.

Both my laptop and the Wii can connect to the wireless network, but both say there is "no Internet connection available" on said network.

My husband — who is amazingly mechanically inclined and handy, but whose computer skills are limited to checking his e-mail and cruising Craigslist for crap we don't need — offered only one solution after each of my dead-end attempts: Bring the router back to the store.

Well, I know that's not the answer. But I'm still holding out on hiring help because:
A:I'm still too cheap.
B. Though I can now admit that I am not that tech savvy, I am still very stubborn.

Maybe I'll have to get Hetan back on the line.

Of course, that will depend on whether the computer is even functioning after all my tinkering. My husband called me while I was working late the other night to ask what I could have possibly done that would cause the keyboard to not work anymore. Oops.

What's the number for the Geek Squad again? You know, just in case ...