Consumer Alert

IF you happen to consume 5 cups of black coffee from 4pm to 10pm thinking that somehow you have become Superman in the last few hours and that in complete contradiction to all previous experience and the known laws of physiology you will drop right off to sleep because it’s been a long day and you pop into bed at 11:30pm and spend the next two hours lying very still with your eyes closed, certain that any second you will fall asleep while thinking about changing the oil in the car and your 401k plan and what time exactly did you say you would be at that meeting tomorrow and if you remembered to take that DVD back to Blockbuster and if it is too late to pick up the Wodehouse book you reserved at the library and work out the plot of three novels and then realize that if you’re going to do that much work on the novel, you might as well write it so you creep out of bed very carefully and shrug on your robe and go downstairs and crank up the laptop and read over the last few chapters and then write until 3:30am and then realize you have to paint the closet at 8am so it can be done before the 11am meeting and think that 4.5 hours of sleep will be plenty and so you set the alarm on your new Motorola V325 for 8am and use the default sound called “Harmonics” without checking it because it has a pleasant-sounding name and then crash in the guest bedroom and then about 90 seconds later it is 8am and the alarm goes off and the sound is not exactly like a train whistle screaming through your head and slamming you against a wall but close enough that a jury of your peers would award you mental anguish compensation and perhaps even punitive damages after deliberating only 5 seconds max . . .

THEN Verizon customer service will NOT . . . I repeat NOT . . . take anything off your bill or even give you a new phone or complimentary free minutes, even though this is a known problem with no workaround, documented extensively at www.KnownProblem.com, so caveat emptor.