My home is a microcosm of many offices--each family member an independent department with its own computing and communications needs, a budget I only imagine I control, and a healthy proclivity to engage in debate. While we operated in a homogenous environment with a Macintosh in each room, a shared Apple laser printer and an

AppleTalk network to link everything together, we were a happy family. Sure, I had to deal with the usual carping about wanting more memory, a processor upgrade or bigger hard drives. And we had one minor insurrection when my teenage kids poked a wire through the walls so they could install an Ethernet connection between their rooms. But one way or another, everything worked, and the care and feeding of our productivity tools never beca me "the monster that ate the weekend."

Microsoft Forever? That all ended when I made the decision to join the res t of corporate America and move to Windows. Approximately $10,000 later I had a fully loaded 266-MHz Pentium II Dell Dimension XPS on my desk and a sleek new IBM ThinkPad 560 on my credenza. All I needed to do was get them to talk to each other, then figure out how to coexist with the other family members who were still on "legacy" systems. Admittedly, I didn't know the first thing about networking in a Windows environment, but they sell this gear to consumers, right? How hard could this be for a guy with an MIT degree and 20 years in the communications business?

Ha! Two days later, I was a blubbering fool, desperately calling the friend who gave me the Xircom Ethernet+Modem PC Card for my ThinkPad. Among other things, he tests and reviews network technology for a living, so I figured if I could persuade him to bail me out, I'd be in good hands.

In exchange for a homemade dinner and a bottle of Merlot, he waded into the mess and in a mere five hours figured out that the situation was beyond his comma nd. How did he break the logjam? Just a call to the president of Xircom, whose office connected us with one of those Class A tech-support people who are held on reserve for reviewers and VIPs. He finally figured out that the infrared port on the ThinkPad, when used in conjunction with the particular driver IBM installed on its PC Card socket, conflicted with the Xircom hardware. After we disabled the infrared and swapped out the PC Card driver, it only took us another three hours to figure out that we needed to increase the size of the IPX/SPX Source Routing cache so we wouldn't get overflows that crashed the desktop when the SCSI bus ran out of poop. Obvious, huh?

Bottom line: I finally understand why the IS department is second only to human resources for its rigid adherence to incomprehensible policies. Thanks to Bill Gates and company, I can now join the rest of the human race, stri pped of my self-esteem and dependent on the goodwill of strangers.

Bill Frezza is a general partner at Adams Ca pital Management. The opinions expressed here are his own. He can be reached at frezza@alum.MIT.EDU or techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.