I hate it when I'm stupid

My net connection went down this afternoon--"Agh! My external brain has been disconnected!" I did my usual reset routine--power cycled (in turn) the cable modem, the router, and my VoIP box. Nothing. Tried it again. Still nothing.

Decided to head out for lunch, and see if it would come back up after that. Went out for a nice half hour walk to my favorite bakery, and had some of their tasty chicken pesto pizza. Walked back directly upwind into the snow (!) that decided to have a very special return engagement.

After getting in and drying off, I checked connectivity. Still nothing. Looked at the router.

"Hrm. What's that cable doing on the floor?"

Reconnected uplink. Duh.

[As a note, the reason why the cable came loose was that I was mucking about with my VoIP box; I just didn't do the logical check of physical connectivity first.]