knew there was a problem when Time Warner told me my apartment didn't exist.

"Our records show that there's no third floor in that building," the person on the phone told me.

"But I'm living in it!"

And yet, you have to expect a little inconvenience in Brooklyn. This is a place where restaurants don't take credit cards, where you can't catch a taxi, where getting to another part of the borough actually requires taking a subway into Manhattan and back out again. The point is: Sometimes, when you call Time Warner, shit takes time.

In my case, shit took two weeks.

Forget the luxury of cable television; I needed wireless internet just to do my job during the hours when I wasn't at my desk. During that period, I was the first person to arrive at my neighborhood boho coffeeshop each morning at 8am, where I would wait for the hungover barista to roll up the metal gate with a cigarette dangling from his lips. And sometimes, I would go back to that coffeeshop after work and stay till it closed at 10:30pm. To make a short story shorter, let me just say that I spent a lot of time in that damn coffeeshop.

Anyway, Time Warner came today. The guy arrived at 11am on a cold and soggy May morning, rain pouring down. I was so happy to see him I could have given him a hug. This was it: my liberation! The day my house becomes a home! Well, the day my shitty, disheveled apartment gets Comedy Central, anyway.

"This is bad," he said, when he came into my apartment. He rubbed his temples, paced the floor. "This is not good."

The apartment, so recently renovated, had been stripped of its cable wiring. Contractors had sliced the cables, which now dangled like dead seaweed in the limbs of the nearby tree.

"I don't think I can do this today," he said, and sighed. "I'd have to have access to your backyard," he said. "I'd have to climb onto your neighbor's roof," he said. "I'd have to shimmy up your fire escape with a cable that might or might not even work," he said. "And I'd have to do this in the pouring rain!"

I don't know what look I gave him, but it must have been good. Because for the next two hours, that is exactly what he did.

Honestly, I do not how he did it. I suspect it was not entirely legal. At one point, he stood on a nearby fire escape and threw me the wire, which I caught by leaning out the bathroom window. At this point, my television had been moved next to the bathtub. It was a crazy afternoon.

The good news? I have internet. I even have Comedy Central. The bad news? In all that time it took to get my cable installed, the poor guy got a parking ticket.