I was on the phone recently with a customer service representative based in India. Yogi, as he identified himself, works for Verizon. He had set up a shared network to help me help my mother, who lives about an hour from me, figure out a glitch she was experiencing with her wireless Internet connectivity.

Because of the nature of the problem, there was a lot of downtime while we waited for pages to load or trouble-shooting programs to run. During one wait, conversation inevitably turned to weather. How cold is it there? How hot is it there?

Yogi told me it was 16 degrees at his location in India. Quite cold, he said. I’m not a math whiz, so doing a precise conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit was out of the question. Then I remembered a tip a fellow traveler shared years ago. You can figure an approximate conversion by doubling the Celsius temperature and adding 30. It’s not exact, but it’s close enough. Try it.

I ran it through my mind — 16 x 2 + 30 = about 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold by Yogi’s standards but balmy compared to the freezing temperatures we’ve been experiencing in the Boston area lately.

— Lisa Matte, editor in chief