I feel like a boy at Disney World whose head doesn’t quite reach Mickey’s hand, thus rendering him too short to ride Space Mountain. And I’m hoping you readers can help me grow a half-inch.

I was lunching with my Network World editor, Toni Kistner, see. And because I’m new, I was trying to get a handle on my readers – their likes, dislikes and, in particular, their level of technical adeptness.

Toni told me we assume very little in the way of IT expertise; after all, home-based business people wear many hats. Underlining her point, she said, “We really assume nothing except maybe that they own and use a PC and a router.”

I said, “I don’t own a router.”

Toni paused – contemplating, no doubt, the mistake she’d made in hiring me. I scrambled to defend myself, pointing out that I’ve been writing about enterprise-grade technology for 18 years. I’ve chatted with CIOs about their $10 million customer relationship management (CRM) software implementations; I have a good grasp on the most promising spam-filtering techniques; and I understand why real-time synchronization is important for some workers’ handheld devices, but not for others’.

Nevertheless, my home technology setup is simple. We have two PCs, each with its own cable-modem connection. Originally, we had one home PC and a dial-up connection. When I began to work at home, I took over the computer. This frustrated us all – my wife and kids found their access limited, and I was inconvenienced whenever one of them needed the PC.

The problem was exacerbated when we got a cable modem, because the rest of the family saw they were missing out on a good thing.

All this led to the purchase of a second PC that lives in the kitchen. We needed broadband for it, and thus I faced the decision. Buy a router, which everybody swore was a simple, cheap, plug-and-play answer, or chicken out and have the cable company install a separate cable modem.

I chickened out. In many ways, I’m not sure this was a mistake. The service is reliable, and even when it goes down, the two-modem system is a nice troubleshooting device. If both units are down, I assume there’s a problem in my area. If only one is on the fritz, I call support.

But I do pay a price for being timid. The additional cable modem cost $50, about half what a good home router would have, but I also pay $20 monthly for the service. In 18 months, I’ve paid $350 so that I wouldn’t have to connect a few wires, read manual and drill three holes in the floor.