By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

If I were trying to obtain something by nefarious means, let me assure you it wouldn’t be a cable box.

But my request for said cable box led to an interrogative frenzy by an Optimum clerk with a pronounced Australian accent: Who are you?  Where do you live?  What is the phone number associated with your account? Hadn’t I keyed in most of this information before I had gotten Crocodile Dundee on the phone?

There were so many questions, you would think I was interviewing to become the ambassador to Australia, not the owner of a cable box in New Jersey. And then came the clincher: Who is the primary person on this account? Uh, oh –roadblock.

Come on. I was the one who had set up the automatic bill pay. You can’t get more authorized than that.  It didn’t matter.  To move forward, I had to temporarily add my husband — oh sorry, the primary person —  to the call and get him to repeat the home address I had already given twice and acknowledge that I was actually his wife.  (Thank goodness for him, he did both.)

With Hal off the line and ten minutes gone, Optimum Guy told me I was now free to decide how I wanted my new cable box delivered. It turned my “freedom to decide” was limited by Optimum Guy’s firm conviction that I ought to run an errand or two and pick the thing up.

Gee, thanks. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have gone to the Internet, found the nearest Optimum location, and cut out the middleman.

I didn’t really want to hear what I learned next from Optimum Guy, that the closest pick-up location was on Market Street in Newark, only 3.8 miles away from where I live.  “Newark?” I don’t want to go to Newark,” I said, as if I were turning down a vacation rental. “There’s also something in Union City,” he offered.

At this point, I was beginning to doubt Optimum Guy and his ability to sort this all out.

More than that, I was a little puzzled. “Don’t you know the area at all? Isn’t there an office in Maplewood or Livingston? Where are you?” I asked. (Maybe he was navigating my cable box request from Perth.)

That’s when Optimum Guy turned snarky. I’m sorry, milady,” he said. “All I can tell you is I’m in the tristate area. I’m not at liberty to tell you exactly where I am.” Milady? Were we in a doomed French novel?

We were doomed alright. He knew my name, my phone number, my address and the fact that until today I hadn’t even been the account holder on my own Optimum account. But he wouldn’t even tell me if he was in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut. Did he think I’d come after him with a metal TV bracket or maybe my nonworking TV?

Then he put me on hold for about seven minutes for what reason I do not know. When he returned, he informed me he could mail me the box if I were willing to wait 7 to 10 business days. “Not sure why you’d want to wait that long milady,” he said a little gratuitously. “You could have it today if only you were willing to pick it up.” If only.

OK, Optimum Guy who wouldn’t even reveal where he worked. You think you know who I am, but I am not nearly as impatient as you assume. I told him to put the box in the mail.

Once more, I was banished to hold. When he came back, he had bad news.

“We can’t send the box through the mail. Our records show you have nine cable boxes in your home. To install a 10th, a technician has to come out in person.”

Nine cable boxes? We don’t even have nine TVs. I wondered if somehow Optimum had confused us with a family with 10 children, three housekeepers, and a Game Of Thrones fixation.

I agreed to the appointment with the technician. But of course Optimum Guy had one more annoying question. “Do you have a dog?” he asked. A dog? Next he’d want to know my shoe size and if I had an IRA.

Some insight: apparently many cable installers are traumatized by dogs, and they have to be on leashes during installation. (I mean the dogs, not the installers.) Having agreed to this final indignity to my dog, I looked through my calendar and made an appointment. He wasn’t done with me yet. While he did god know’s what, he put me on hold again.

It was in those blessed five minutes that I devised a plan to finally foil Optimum Guy. In a house that allegedly had more cable boxes than toilets, surely I could come up with a solution. Carrying the cellphone into my grown son’s room, I found the missing link, a cable box not otherwise engaged.

And a scant forty five minutes and seven seconds after the ordeal began, I told Optimum Guy I no longer needed a cable box. And on that cold note, I bid adieu forever to milord — I mean, to Optimum Guy.

Luckily, I won’t have to make many of these calls in the future.  Apparently Optimum says my husband and I are awash in cable boxes. If Optimum’s right, I only hope one day I can find them.