The woman on the phone was upset. Her screen had frozen, and for nearly a half-hour, she looked for the reset button the back of her Macintosh computer. She called me when I was working at Sunline at the Charlotte Sun Herald. And for some time, I tried to help her.

Bu on certain old Macs, the reset button is nothing more than a large pinhole that is difficult to find. To make matters worse, this woman's Mac was pushed hard again the wall and couldn't be pulled out because the wires were all tangled.

Finally, after a near half-hour on the phone and realizing I was not much of a help, I said, "Just tell me where you live and I'll come out." She lived only 10 minutes from the newspaper. So I shot out there and sure enough, her Mac was smack dab against the wall on a desk in an entertainment center set-up.

I put my fingers on the back of the Macintosh computer but even I couldn't find the reset button. So I got on the floor on my back, scooted under the desk and looked up from behind the desk.

Finally, I could see the reset button. But when I went to hit the button, it occurred to me that this woman should see where this button is located so that in the future, she could reset her computer herself.

"Why don't you let me show you this?" I asked her.

Sooooo, she gets on her back and crawls under the desk with me.

Then, at that very moment, the husband comes home.

No kidding.

"Honey, what are you doing?" he asks, seeing two sets of legs coming out from under the desk.

At this point, I'm in utter shock, knowing how bad this looks. I turn to the woman and she is laughing so hard that she's making no noise as she sucks air. Tears of laughter are streaming from her eyes.

Then she blurts out:

"He's...he's...he's show me my power button!"

The story above is true. Fortunately, when I stood up from under the desk, the husband recognized me and laughed along. But the story is not entirely unusual. When you deal with the Internet, funny situations are commonplace.

For example, there was the person who called tech help at Sunline to say he was having trouble with his CD-ROM drive. He had one of the CD-ROMs where you put the disk in the tray and close the little door.

Halfway through the telephone call, the Sunline tech help person says, "Sir, put the CD-ROM in the drive and close the door."

Following directions, the person puts the CD in the drive, then puts the phone down, gets up and closes the bedroom door. He then gets back on the phone.

"I don't see what that has to do with it," he says.

I know, I know. You're probably saying to yourself, "How can you tell these stories about the Sunline customers?"

Well, when I was there, the Sunline customers actually joked about these things themselves. At the free classes we gave, the customers actually came up to me afterwards to laugh with others about some of the funny things we've all done as beginners.

Perhaps the most funny ongoing story is about the wives, husbands and kids who call us around 5 p.m. each day, frantically asking us how to empty their browser cache so others can't figure out where they've been surfing.

One ingenious fellow called me and said, "Yeah, I'm getting my wife her birthday present and don't want her to know where I've been looking."

There was a long pause.

"That's a good one, sir," I said. "I don't think I've heard that one before."

The guy started laughing. He had been visiting nudie sites.

"OK, OK, you got me. Quick, tell me how to get rid of this before she gets home."

One of the funniest episodes happened when a man came in to get a photo of him and his wife scanned and put on disk. It's a service Sunline offers. The photo was a lovely one.

The next day, he came back to pick up his disk with the photo on it. He went home, put the disk in his computer and called up the photo on his computer screen.

It was a photo of lingerie models.

Sunline was putting together a lingerie site for an advertiser and had handed him the wrong disk.

I would have just loved to hear him explain that to his wife.