I am through with D-Link for good and all.

A month ago, I started having connection problems and slow loading problems, off and on, on my wireless Apple laptop. To a lesser degree, so did my husband on his wired PC. He called AT&T; I called Apple. They suggested checking the router settings. Since we’re both computer klutzes, I had to pay $32 for help doing that, but that worked. For a day. Maybe it’s not the router, I thought, and I got the modem checked out, but it was working perfectly. So I called D-Link again, because I had the receipt to prove I’d only had the router since Sept. 28th.

This was a week ago Thursday, around lunchtime. I got a phone menu dead end. My only choice was to leave a message, and they said they’d get back to me within two business days. That meant Monday noon, which came and went without a call.

So midafternoon on Monday, I called the same number I had on a slip of paper that I had called on Thursday. This time I got a menu that took me all around the mulberry bush, but at least it skipped the dead end “Leave a message.”  After fifteen minutes, I heard the series of buzzes that tells you someone’s about to come on the line. Then the buzzing stopped, the Muzak stopped, the intermittent “Your call is important to us” stopped, and silence set in. After a minute or two, I figured I’d been disconnected, so I hung up and tried again.

I got the same “Here we go round the mulberry bush” menu, waited fifteen minutes, heard the buzzes, and–hallelujah–got an actual human being. She asked me a question, I answered it, and without any warning found myself back in the “mulberry” menu, where I waited for another fifteen minutes.

I was fuming. I made the young man who answered listen to the tale of my mistreatment. He was polite. He wasn’t convinced the router was the problem, so I did all the voodoo stuff the techies tell you to do, and after awhile, my laptop had a connection again. I was loath to let him go, though, because everybody this last month seemed capable of restoring my connection for at least twenty minutes, but I had no faith this would be permanent.

“What happens,” I asked, “if I hang up and lose my connection again? Do I have to leave a message and wait two days? Or call and waste 45 minutes waiting to talk to someone?”

“Blah-di-blah-blah,” he told me. Which boiled down to “Yep,those are the choices. But don’t worry. I fixed it.”

“I don’t have faith that you did,” I said. “And I don’t like those choices.”

“I’ll pray for you,” he told me. Seriously. “I’ll pray that your computer will continue to work correctly.”

He was a good hearted soul, but I was right not to have faith in his prayers. I was out of town on Tuesday. On Wednesday, my computer wasn’t working. I’m sparing you all the curses and screaming. I called D-Link–same number I’d called the other two times–and was told to leave a message, that I’d hear from them in two business days. I called again and got the same dead end.

You won, D-Link. I gave up on getting a free replacement and bought a Linksys. My computer was running slow this morning, so I called the new router company. After choosing English from the menu, I got an actual human being, who determined that the problem was with my Apple. I called Apple, chose English, and got a human. He helped me make a minor adjustment that the new router necessitated, and the problem disappeared.

But who knows? Maybe tomorrow, my connection will go kerflooey again. Living with computers is like having an unfaithful lover. Maybe the D-Link router wasn’t even faulty. Maybe I needed to call Apple after the D-Link techie prayed for me. Or maybe the router was faulty. I don’t know for sure, because I couldn’t get through to D-Link in a timely manner to figure it out.

Their product may be OK, but the service is crap. Be warned.