And now there's this anthrax deal, which has forced me to consign to the woodstove all mail that fails to display the passwords, "Pay to the order of." You can't be too careful these days, and if an occasional bill goes unpaid, well, we'll have no war profiteering in these parts, buddy. Not as long as we have chilly mornings and logs to light.

  Anyway, when I resolved to give Al Qaeda's beard a yank by spending money I didn't have on something I didn't need—an Apple iBook 600 with the combo drive that does everything but actually download the porn and unzip your Levis for you—I decided to employ another delivery service to fetch it hither. You don't want to stuff a brand-new $1,700 laptop in the woodstove, no matter how brisk the weather.

  A Big Mac Attack. Frankly, I wasn't that excited about the purchase. But the Commander-in-Cliché kept insisting that we all must set our Visa cards ablaze if we're to smoke the evildoers out of their holes and get 'em running, though I don't think the Taliban is going to be scared of Steve Jobs, no matter how much of my money he brandishes. So I called up PowerMax, where humans answer the phones without making you touch-tone your way through a voice-mail maze.

  "Send me your finest iBook with all haste," I told the salesperson. "The nation is at war, and I require a tax deduction."

  "Yessir," she replied crisply, a salute in her tone. "That will ship via Airborne Express, Second-Day Service."

  Airborne Express. We call them "Airhead Excess" here. The last time I ordered something to be delivered by Airhead—the least efficient delivery system since the medieval catapult—they dropped it off at a dude ranch in an entirely different mountain range, a 45-minute drive from here.

  Still, a delivery person who can't find the right mountain range is unlikely to run over your dog, especially if the Postal Service has already beaten him to it, so I took the gamble. The Northern Alliance was prancing to and fro for CNN like a mob of bearded drag queens in Vicky's Secret combat chic, and as a veteran of uniformed service myself (Mitchell High School Marauders Marching Band, 1968-69), I wanted to show my solidarity.

  Your Call Is Important To Us (Not). When the iBook didn't appear by 5:30 p.m. on the second day, I e-mailed PowerMax for an airbill number and checked the Airheads' online tracking system. It was listed as "out for delivery" from the Colorado Springs office at 10:30 that morning.

  What PowerMax and I didn't know then was that the Airheads has ceased even trying to deliver anything here, though they take your money just the same. Once your package hits Colorado Springs, they hand it off to—guess who?—the Postal Service. This I found out when I phoned the Airheads' customer-service department, getting a nasty case of carpal tunnel in all 10 fingers from punching menu options only to learn that my iBook was in the clutches of the dog-killers.

  The USPS number I was given bore no fruit when typed into the Posties' tracking site (I learned afterward that customer service had misplaced a digit), and I was convinced that some thieving Airhead was kickin' back in his single-wide, downloading his porn with my laptop and getting it all sticky.

  So I called customer service again—"Don't you people know there's a war on?"—only to be referred to the "Service Guarantee," 857 words of fine print that says the Airheads will be delighted to issue a refund for services unrendered unless they don't feel like it, which they don't, especially with their ears smoking from your insinuation that their parents had only the briefest of relationships, one in which money changed hands, and not much of it, either.

  Disbelief. Disconnection. Dejection. And then, five days later, the Postal Service called.

  "Your package is here," the caller says. It's Sunday, but she'll give my iBook if I come around to the back door.