My entire morning was destroyed by the geniuses at Time Warner cable. A guy came by to install TW’s new wideband service (“speeds up to 50 mbps”), and it took him well over 90 minutes to figure things out with the TW brainiacs back at TW command central. And then he couldn’t type in the right password, and we spent nearly a half-hour trying to decipher that mystery.

And then we discovered than only two computers could use the wireless service at the same time, and not three. (Which I have.) Then I couldn’t access Gmail, either through the online platform or via Thunderbird. And then that eventually resolved itself but only after much arguing and exasperation and trying to understand certain nouns and verbs as spoken by tech support guys with New York Hispanic accents.

And then a tech support guy from Metropolitan Cable named Juan (whom I later learned is actually a member of SPECTRE — special executive for counter-intelligence, terrorism, revenge and extortion) called to explain that I actually hadn’t had TW’s wideband service installed, but something less fast. He called it “torrbough.” What? “Torrbough.” What’s torrbough? I don’t know what youre sayin’, man. “Torrbough,” he repeated. Could you please spell it? “T-U-R-B-O,” he said. Oh, turbo….fine! So you’re saying I have turbo and not wideband? “That’s what it says on my computer.”

The service guy came back an hour later and explained that Juan is some kind of mental defective impostor (like that guy Tony Curtis played in The Great Impostor) and that he’d taken flight about 20 minutes earlier and that he’s now being hunted down by Time Warner agents. The service guy said I was cool, that I had wideband, and that I really didn’t need to worry or even think about turbo or “turrbough” or anything along those lines.