When they can't keep up with the new weekday schedule on the first day it's in effect, it's obvious there's a problem. Or maybe I'm just annoyed because I set my alarm to wake me up five minutes earlier so I could leave the apartment five minutes earlier so I could catch the bus five minutes earlier -- and I didn't have to do any of that.

But on the bright side, because the route of the 156 was severely truncated to try to force people onto the new Orange Line, there were plenty of seats available.

This morning, I thought I had slept really late. I stumbled out to the living room and turned on DirecTV Channel 700, which shows the scores of all the NFL games in progress, and was surprised that they were only in the first quarter.

Turns out I had gotten distracted and forgot to set my clocks back before I went to bed Saturday night.

For the unused portion of my TV Guide subscription, I got a refund check for $53.13 -- "53" and "13" clearly to honor two of the most prominent stations in the now-deceased Pittsburgh Metropolitan Edition, "WPGH (Fox)" and "WQED (PBS)" -- actually, I have some copies of the Pittsburgh edition that are old enough that it's WQED (Educ.), and WPGH is nonexistent. And by "prominent," I mean "actually in Pittsburgh, unlike all those stations from Altoona and Youngstown and Wheeling that counted as neither 'Pittsburgh' nor 'metropolitan,' except that the station in Steubenville came in pretty well in my apartment with rabbit ears."

So, any thoughts on how I should spend this windfall?

The new issue of TV Guide (October 9th cover date) is the last digest-size issue. It contains an article about TV Guide collectors. The writer of that article interviewed me -- via cell phone while I was in a back yard in Ypsilanti, Michigan -- but I'm not mentioned in the actual article because she was more interested in focusing on cover collectors, even though it's edition collectors like me who are losing their raison d'etre with the format change. Probably not enough room in the 2-page article to try to explain local editions, although they do mention the "pre-national" version of TV Guide.

Now, this book about TV Guide, advertised in the back pages of this issue, happens to have been written by one of the people quoted in the printed version of the article. I have not written a book.

Yes, I'm going to cancel my subscription unless the first issue of the new format knocks my socks off, and by that I mean it would have to contain nude photos of Eva Longoria and the news that she's tired of dating basketball players and is looking for a closed-captioner-turned-video-logger instead.