This is very frustrating, but I don’t have a column this week. Mind you, I did write one, the same way I always do — by getting really angry while fixing a toaster, and having a intern write down everything I say. But I couldn’t get a copy of it to the newspaper office.

I never would have expected this, because nowadays we have so many ways of sending information — e-mail, faxes, mobile phones, geeky web pages with inventive misspellings. We’ve even got phone card services that are so simple, a guy I know can almost use one!

So I figured I could just call in my column on a mobile phone, reading it aloud to my editor from the same location as always — in a movie theater, during the quiet parts. I’d simply hand over my fate to that newborn giant of telecommunications, that hybrid of GTE’s grandeur and Bell Atlantic’s down-home country goodness, the phone company we can rely on most, Verizon.

Here’s a partial transcript from that call:

“Okay. First line. ‘Now that the FBI has visited the offices of Paterson’s Mayor Martin G. Barnes, I can finally spin an FBI conspiracy theory that involves our area. So to begin with’ — I will not shut up, I paid for a ticket, same as you, and this is how I prefer to enjoy the movie — ‘So to begin with, what do we know for sure about the FBI investigation?

“‘A) It involves trips Barnes took to Europe.

“‘B) The trips may have been related to sewer contracts.

“‘C) Somebody — perhaps one of you — killed Bobby Kennedy….’”

“WE INTERRUPT THIS CALL IN THE NAME OF THE COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS OF AMERICA AND THE INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF ELECTRICAL WORKERS. By using the phone, you have undermined our strike against Verizon, a company that will soon draw strikebreakers from the world’s most notoriously cheap labor market, graduate students — willing to work for just $5 a day and the chance to sneer at co-workers. No one can…”

“We interrupt this interruption. We at Verizon are back in control of the phone lines. Also, the protesters who sabotaged them are not in pain at this time. We control your communication. We make you say what we want. Now dance like a monkey.”

So obviously, I couldn’t dictate over the phone. As I said, though, we live in a miraculous age, the most miraculous aspect of which is e-mail. Through e-mails, for example, I’ve learned that the late comedian Jackie Gleason financed Al Gore’s first run for congress. It’s not true, of course. But I’ve learned it. Instantly.

So I e-mailed my column — through the Verizon phone lines. This is how it came out on the other end:

“… Here’s how we connect Robert Kennedy to the Paterson sewer contracts: Barnes went to Switzerland. Bobby Kennedy went to Harvard. The Swiss make chocolate. If you take out all the letters in Harvard that are also in chocolate, the letters left over spell rvrd, which is the same noise I make in the morning. Therefore, if anyon#$$* &(*&!@% #@^%#$# Because you have sent an e-mail, 12 Verizon workers must work mandatory triple overtime to process it, and one member of middle management will be tortured with 19th century dental instruments. IS YOUR MESSAGE IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO COST A MAN HIS TEETH?!!!"

I also tried faxing. But it just came out as a picture. Of a hand. Doing something.

But it’s not like a few problems with the phone lines can destroy civilization, right? It’s not like our new technology relies on our same old unstable human condition.

I still contend that we live in amazing times – unstoppable, miraculous days when all our thoughts glide into one another in vast harmony, a communications utopia of ATTENTION, FASCIST!! THERE IS A BOMB IN YOUR HOUSE!!!