For the past couple of days, I’ve been sitting in the den next to the DSL modem and the wireless router. “What are you doing in there?” Kris asked yesterday afternoon. It’s not a place I normally sit.

“I found an ethernet cable,” I told her, “so I plugged directly into the router. I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s faster. It’s a zippier internet connection.”

And so I’ve been sitting in my easy chair, writing about money, writing about fitness, writing about writing. I’ve been enjoying my zippy connection.

This afternoon, I had to boot up Windows to work on some programming for Custom Box Service. (I’m done there, by the way! I’m semi-officially a full-time writer.) When it came time to upload the program to our server, Windows didn’t want to recognize the network connection. I unplugged the ethernet cable and tweaked the connection from the control panel to upload via wireless. Then I plugged the cable back in.

And so I’ve returned to a wired existence. Except maybe not.

Just now I got up to let the cats outside and to get a handful of almonds. When I came back to my chair, I was puzzled to see that the network cable was unplugged. “How’d that happen?” I wondered.

When I went to plug the cable into my computer, I discovered it already was! This was the end that was supposedly plugged into the router!

That’s right — for the past two days, I’ve been enjoying a placebo effect while computing.