I have no one to blame but myself. Yesterday, I lightly (I thought) poked fun at Google’s telephony ambitions, in light of Grand Central’s several-hour outage this weekend. How could Google play in telephony if they didn’t adhere to the rock-solid, five-nines reliability the phone network is known for? Separately, just days earlier, I’d crowed: The Web is the Web and Telecom is Telecom.

This morning, my DSL connection — out of nowhere, I was working away happily — went dead. A remote line test and AT&T tech call later, I found out the scary truth: my DSL modem was cooked. Dead. Out of commission.

I guess that’s what I get for messing with the Google Gods (Larry, Sergey and Eric … maybe, given this, I should throw in Marissa too … I’ve got enough bad Google karma as it is…)

I’ve had DSL in my current location since 2003, with nary a problem.

This is not a joke. Nor is it link bait (well maybe a little). For eighty bucks I could have just bought some traffic (using Google AdSense of course).

See my dead modem sadly resting on my shiny new DSL box. Check out the Best Buy receipt for further proof.

Sad to say, it wasn’t just AT&T (my DSL provider) making me eat crow today. When I made the run to my local Best Buy for the new modem, I noticed a Verizon retail store on the way. I’ve got a corporate-issue Windows-based Treo, with Verizon’s very nice high-speed data service. I figured I’d stop in and pick up a laptop tether cord as a back-up for any future outages (or just for travel).

The Verizon store was large and beautiful (if a bit empty at lunch-time). Three sales reps converged on me. I told them I was looking for a modem tether cord. Their answer: we don’t carry that here.

But I could order it: online.