My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.