You and I have friends who spend countless delightful hours watching their NASCAR and football heroes break bones and mutilate themselves and each other. It doesn’t matter if one is getting fresh coffee in the kitchen during an exceptional rollover or player pile-up, because those are the only segments that warrant dozens of replays.

When injuries increased in sporting events, viewership and a corresponding number of advertising dollars went up. That’s when, for simply hurting others, some modern gladiators received the kind of bonuses that have not been seen since the days of Tiberius.

It was long ago that my wife, Marsha, and I moved past the superficial misery provided by hockey, boxing and other blood sports. Every morning when we hear that some would-be Barney Fife has accidentally shot himself in the toe, we make a little mark on a tally sheet on our refrigerator door: ////

So you can understand our distress when, without notice, our DirecTV wouldn’t bring up the morning news, with its inevitable body count. According to the code on the screen, our kindly hostess was in arrears for her bill. If you can’t already guess how this happened, please read on.

All of the dozens of life-enhancing infomercial channels worked perfectly, however, along with Channel 500, which somehow crept in under the bar. Later in the day, it enabled me to watch “NYPD Blue” for the first time, which was an education. But that’s another story.

While trolling infomercials, I saw Larry King listening to a woman extolling the benefits of a fish oil product that was guaranteed to eliminate stiffness – arguably not one of the aged Mr. King’s primary concerns.

Are you surprised that I have never been mistaken for Larry King? Neither one of us has ever been seen in public without a sporty pair of L.L. Bean suspenders.

Unless I misremember, a man on that show said that people over 55 take an average of five different medications. I take only a thyroid pill, which does nothing; a baby aspirin, which I hope keeps clear all the little pipes and tubes in my body; and a stomach pill, which does a pretty good job of keeping the baby aspirin from killing me. So unless you count the several cough drops I go through in a day and the three gigantic BrainStrong capsules provided by my neurologist friend Jeremy, I’m not doing my share to keep our struggling pharmaceutical industry afloat.

On this program we were introduced to several “actual fish oil pill users,” which raised the question of the difference between someone who used the fish oil pills and someone who actually used them.

Could you compare this to someone who stops at a stop sign and someone who comes to a complete stop at a stop sign – and braces himself for the shock of being struck in the rear end by a tailgating driver who thought the car ahead was only going to stop and not completely stop?

And now, because you have been kind enough to hang in here with me this far, I will, as promised, tell you why DirecTV pulled the plug on us yesterday.

When our gracious hostess, who provides us with our TV service, called in to find out why we had been so unceremoniously shut off, she was told that her credit card had expired in 2008.

Why, she asked, did they provide her with service between 2008 and 2015 if her credit card had expired in 2008?

Incoherent mumbling on the other end of the line.

As a matter of fact, her credit card will not expire until 2018, but someone or something at billing had erroneously punched a “0” instead of a “1” into a keyboard.

Over a period of four hours, our friend ran down the batteries in two cellphones trying to resolve this mix-up and restore our television service.

Who, you might ask, are these faceless, indifferent entities who inhabit tiny cubicles where they eat greasy pork sandwiches as they punch your destiny into crumb-littered keyboards? They are our friends who supervise and maintain the great information superhighway in America today. And they vote.

Has one of your service providers ever mistakenly shut you down, or billed you a year in advance and refused to terminate the service, or overcharged you, or misread your check or credit card? Do things like this happen to you?

Or are you living in a mountaintop cave in Tibet?

The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:

www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html

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