I was pondering just yesterday the plight of Mr. Buttle. How many of us are going to end up just like him; tortured to death because of a typo? See I can never decide what's worse. The loss of our civil liberties or the mind numbing incompetence of the people in whom our precarious freedoms are entrusted.

Here's what brought this to mind. Yesterday my internet service was out for most of the day. In my frustration, I called Verizon, who owns all the pipe around here, and keeps it functioning about as well as the duct-work in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." But when I called them, a customer service rep (the lot of them are the bane of my existence) told me that he could not tell me anything, because when I told him the name on the account, he insisted that I was wrong. I explained, "A bill manages to find its way here every month and we pay it." This confused him terribly. I asked him if the name on the account was the one for which we receive a myriad of calls; the previous owners of our dialing digits... yes. Well that explains why we're getting so many wrong numbers six months later. So I was gaffed off because of a data entry error by the same company that left us without phone service for a month when they botched our order. I loathe Verizon.