“I would love for the family to chip in and buy me a dongle for my birthday.”

If my daughter Zoe was astonished by my request she didn’t show it. I know it’s a strange present for a 50 year old menopausal woman, but when you’re strange and menopausal you just know what you want. To the uninitiated, this oddly named device plugs into a computer USB port enabling access to the internet.

I am aware that, to most people, my gift choice is rather like requesting a lady shave for you wedding anniversary or an electric whisk for Christmas, but I had a plan in mind which required internet access and no online connection in which to carry it out. With money tight, my husband John and I cancelled our landline subscription a while ago and made do by using pay-as-you-go mobiles phones to receive calls. It really cut costs but we had to forgo our internet connection. It was something I didn’t miss much until now.

A couple of months ago, my favourite woman’s magazine contained an article on how to make extra cash; suggestions ranged from selling handmade arts and crafts to offering your services as a virtual PA. In fact the internet was sited as holding a wealth of opportunities for a budding dot.com entrepreneur. My interest was ignited by reference to ’subsidising your income by doing paid online-surveys’ and I thought to myself how hard could that be? By chance, the same magazine held a leaflet advertising mobile phones and mobile broadband connectors (dongles). A pay-as-you-go mobile connection seemed the answer to my humanist prayers.

The first step, in my money making venture, was to check that I could obtain a strong enough signal for a prospective mobile internet connection and to compare costs and monthly price plans. I checked out all the mobile websites for information.

For the first requirement, it seemed you simply typed in your postcode and with a click of the mouse I was given a resounding YES there was a signal in my street more than adequate for my needs. It was very reassuring as I knew my area had a history of signal problems, specifically for the GoConnect* mobile network but hey, that was a couple of years ago.

All the pay-as-you-go broadband dongles were about the same price to buy (you get one for free if you subscribe to their monthly rental plan) so I based my choice on the cheapest download package; GoConnect looked like the one for me. John wasn’t so convinced but, as I profess to be the computer expert in the household, he didn’t argue his point too much.

With mobile internet connections, you don’t pay for surf time or a daily/monthly connection, you pay for Megabyte and Gigabyte downloads. £10 for 1Gigabyte appeared to be the cheapest top-up package available, which would cover me for all my e-mailing, downloading of survey forms and surfing the net. It lasted for 30 days or 1 gigabyte of usage, what ever came first. You can use up lots of megabytes uploading music and video files but, although useful for the family, it wasn’t a necessity for me. Anyway, if I wanted to, I could always purchase an extra top-up for that privilege. Let me rephrase that, they could buy extra top-ups.

So choices made, Zoe purchased and presented me with my brand-new 3G Ahyme** E160G USB modem a few days before my 50th birthday.

I’m not sure she got any joy from giving me this gift. Giving me a dongle for my birthday didn’t have the same ring to it as say, giving me a piece of jewellery or a watch; maybe she felt it was too practical for such a significant day, or maybe it was the off-putting name of the device. I expect she dreaded being asked what she got her mother for her 50th and having to explain what this strangely named contraption was and why it wasn’t something you could treasure forever and wear on special occasions. Anyway I thanked her with all the excitement of a child on Christmas morning and like that child proceeded to put it to immediate use.

The whole family had to fend for themselves that day, I had little thoughts of meals or household chores, (they are never greatly on my list of priorities anyway) I was on a mission to get connected. I enthusiastically plugged it into the laptop; the incorporated driver automatically downloaded the software and…nothing. I tried again…and again…still nothing.

Picking up the instructions, which I’d discarded in my hurry to get on with the task, I who always slag John for not reading the instructions, scanned them for some hint as to where I’d gone wrong. The manuals technical content was minimal, basically saying plug the thing into a USB and off you go.

After I’d tried the blasted dongle with every computer we have (we have a collection of computers, of various ages, dotted about most rooms in the house; hasn’t everyone?), I realised it was time for some technical support.

With financial caution, I ignored the helpline number printed thoughtfully and boldly on the back of the manual. I had no intentions of relieving my own mobile phone of a considerable amount of credit. I needed to get online to GoConnect’s website to sort out the problem. I was starting to feel like a character in a technological parody of the song ‘There’s a hole in my bucket’. There’s a glitch in my connection dear ‘Lizah, Well go on the internet dear Henry’. I’m sure you get the idea.

Then it struck me, of course the damn thing wouldn’t work, I hadn’t put any credit in it yet. The instructions had said that the GoConnect web page was free to view but maybe that was only after the initial top-up.

Armed with dongle, laptop and instructions, I made the trek to Zoe’s house and her landline broadband.

The GoConnect website was on the screen in an instant. I activated my top-up voucher then I filled out the enrolment form and logged into my account.

Try as I might it wasn’t going to let me in; I kept getting the message ‘incorrect password’. It couldn’t possibly be the wrong password; I had it written down in front of me. Giving up, I pressed the ‘have you forgotten your password?’ tab. When the screen came up I checked over my details and finished by entering my newly generated password, as instructed, by copying it from the box that contained a distorted group of letters. You know what I mean don’t you? That distorted word thingy you have to squint at to make out.

That done I was informed my new password would arrive shortly, by text! (So what was that thing I just typed into the box at the end of the registration form?)

Joyful news though this was, where was the text going to go? Cyberspace? It certainly wouldn’t turn up in my inbox as GoConnect didn’t have my phone number. It was Zoe who came to my rescue by explaining that the dongle contained a sim-card so therefore could receive text messages.

Sure enough when I clicked on the LetsGo logo on my own computer, a connection window containing a little envelope appeared on screen. This contained two welcome texts from GoConnect.

Now I admit to being one of the multitudes of Scots who never bothered to learn a second language and I’m too old to want to learn texting-slang, but as it happened neither would have helped me out deciphering these text messages. Written in Unicode, they consisted of a neat little row of boxes. There was a password hidden amongst those boxes, but that was F***-all use to me!

On further investigation, I discovered that I could choose to have my text messages delivered as standard or in Unicode format! The GoConnect providers somehow thought I would prefer Unicode. Why would they want to do that? Did they think I was a budding espionage agent with an automatic decoder attached to my computer and not the increasingly irritated, middle-aged female that I was becoming?

My second attempt at password creating was successful and at last I got the problem solving details I sought. Turns out I had installed the mechanism correctly but, although the connection signal was strong enough for area, it ran like an infra-red beam across a section of my house. I spent many a frustrating hour pointing the dongle in all directions, trying to local that elusive signal. Visions of my granddad tuning in his black and white telly, using an indoor aerial, came to mind.

Eventually, by pure chance, I came upon the most successful spot, my bedroom. In fact, on the very spot were I collapsed wearily after all my activity.What could be more fortunate? I could now work from home without having to leave the comfort of my own bed, although maybe a bit inconvenience if John decided to have one of his long lies.

*GoConnect is a factitious mobile network provider.

**Ahyme is a question I ask myself frequently.