Recently, I have spent about 8½ hours of my life, time I will never get back, on the phone dealing with Time Warner Cable customer service, or disservice, in this case. And at my age, that's an awful lot of time to waste.

My age is awful, too, but that's another story.

Anyway, it all started when I had to switch over my Internet service to Time Warner's high-speed Roadrunner. I kind of rely on high-speed service because I work from home to bring you these little pearls of banality, so I had to hook up with something.

In the initial setup, however, the company got one digit of my address wrong. The megabytes-per-second came through OK, and the postal person knew the proper place to deliver the bills, but he started writing on the envelopes suggesting a correction, which made sense to me because what if I had a substitute letter carrier the day the next invoice was delivered and I couldn't pay my bill because I didn't get it, and you'd be deprived of a life-altering or lunch-losing read, and I just couldn't let that happen.

Whew, give me a minute to catch my breath.