> Now when my modem starts getting twitchy, I get an email which is my
> cue to call the help desk and get somebody working on it [...]

Definitely a good use for Perl. For similar monitoring purposes, we extended the script to also attempt to automatically put the help desk to work when switch ports hit their 8th MAC address and port security kicked in to block new MAC addresses.

Since you mention your connection is still workable when you get a message, perhaps it's a nice touch to actively alert the helpdesk automatically ;)

Next thing might be logging their responses and response times to determine their learning curve over the course of time.