The closing of EGM hit its subscribers pretty hard. I felt the loss especially deeply, as it came exactly two days after I had renewed my subscription. And so as we all bid farewell to the magazine upon which many of us had depended for gaming news for years, if not decades, my own mourning was accompanied by the double-sting of also having wasted twenty dollars.

 A couple months later I learned that the twenty dollars had not exactly been wasted when I opened my mailbox and learned that my subscription had been transferred to Maxim.

 It was that exact moment, with me standing in the courtyard of my apartment complex where my elderly neighbors could see me, staring aghast at a cover featuring Olivia Wilde and asking "Why?", that the fun began.

 I know I was lucky to get anything, but still...Maxim? Was the assumption that every reader of EGM was male, or just that they all had very specific opinions about women? Was I no different from my creepy neighbor who drives a big blue van with a cage behind the driver's seat? He has a subscription to Maxim.

This could not stand. The subscription had to be cancelled.

After a lot of mucking about online, filling out forms and trying (unsuccessfully) to determine which particular section of the random sequence of numbers in the address box constituted my subscription ID, I decided that it would probably be easiest just to make a phone call. Of course, I made this decision several minutes before a boob-filled quest through the magazine for a number for subscription inquiries. Finally I found a general contact number, and called it.

The customer service representative I got was a woman. I suddenly felt a need to explain myself, which often happens to me at times when it is not necessary to do so.

"Okay," I said. "I had a subscription to EGM. But then EGM folded, and now it looks like I have a subscription to Maxim, but I don't want a subscription to Maxim. I would like to cancel, please."

She verified my identity and told me that this  was fine, and that she would send me a refund check for twenty-four dollars. I was going to make a profit on this deal. I hung up the phone feeling pretty good, and tossed the magazine in with the recycling.

A few weeks later, the check arrived. I cashed it and, since the refund check had "Maxim" written on it in pretty large letters, I felt compelled to tell the bank clerk the whole story. I put the cash into my wallet, pledging to the ghost of EGM that I would spend Maxim's money on a video game, even though technically it had just been my money all along. Two days later I received a notice from my bank saying that the check had bounced due to insufficient funds, and that they had charged me a fee of nineteen dollars.

I got back on the phone with Maxim and asked  what was going on. The representative told me that there had been a "glitch" in the system that weekend, and that I should redeposit the check and have my bank fax them the slip with the fee, and that they would refund the nineteen dollars as well.

"And that nineteen dollars," I said, "is that going to clear?"

"Um, yes," the guy said.

 So I returned to my bank, redeposited the check, got sent over to someone else for the fax, told him the entire story, then told it again to the guy in the adjoining cubicle because he couldn't hear the last part over his own laughter. The first guy told me that the fax machine was for business use only (I'm not sure what I was asking him to use it for), so I walked to a grocery store four blocks away to use their fax machine. The girl at the grocery store wouldn't let me use their fax machine because it didn't print out a confirmation, but she directed me to a place a couple blocks away that had a fax machine that did. So I walked over there, spent a couple of bucks, got the thing faxed, and went home.

And now I wait.

Moral: I can stand to lose twenty dollars. However, I will not spend twenty dollars on something I neither want nor asked for. And to recover forty-three dollars, I will jump through however many hoops are placed in front of me.