I have tried to unsubscribe from this random, mysterious New Yorker digital subscription for the past two years, and I always end up in some customer service bottomless pit that leaves me so frustrated and angry that I ultimately just drop it and set a reminder to get ahead of it before next year. More often than not, the best way to avoid obsessing over this and wasting time trying to track down who’s responsible for this oversight is pretty simple for me: Go outside. Or meditate. Or simply pause — always pause — while I’m agitated. But I let this one slip past the goalie

I have an extra digital-only subscription. I don’t know which app I purchased it from four years ago. I’ve tried to cancel this NYER subscription for the past two years, but I gave up halfway through this maddening process. Just please let me unsubscribe via email, or send Richard Brody over to my house with a hammer and have him beat me to death with it once and for all, so I don’t have to go through this again next year.

(Richard Brody, for those who don’t know, is the magazine’s longtime movie critic.)

Not the end of the world. No Chatbots were harmed in this interaction — except that it opened the door to another little dust-up a day later, this time with a real-live human. Even though it was clear they were an anonymous one spoiling for an internet fight, I took the bait.

Some of you might know that I’m one of the part-time parenting advice columnists for Slate’s popular “Care and Feeding” series. It’s one of the most fun freelance gigs I’ve ever had, one where I get to exercise my atrophied blogging muscles two or three times per month.

Even though many of my responses come equipped with old-school shit-fire, I try to craft thoughtful ones, too, not just self-indulgent over-the-top reactions in order to land a joke. For the first time, a reader from that community emphatically disagreed with my advice, enough to send me an (anonymous) email, and said I displayed a “catastrophically bad lapse in judgment.”