What was once a minor irritation — sign-offs without warning, the need to bounce back and forth to the home page repeatedly in an attempt to sign back in — has become a one-way trip to the the looney bin.

Not only am I required to take four steps to sign into my email account — home page, sign-in page, home page, inbox — but I can now only access one mailbox at a time. To see my other mailboxes (i.e. the ones I use to conduct various aspects of my business), I must sign out and sign back in just to see if there is new mail in the box.

It’s about a 45-second process, done at least 200 times per day, 25 days a month minimum. If time is money, I’m paying through the nose just to access my damn e-mail.

Close to a breakdown, I called Comcast to report this appalling oversight in their ballyhooed new application.  I spent more than an hour on the phone with a supervisor — never settle for a line person, always go straight to a super — trying first just to access my secondary mailboxes and, second,to convey my enormous dissatisfaction with their sxqw@!$@sxa! “upgrade.”

“Look how much time we’re wasting on this,” I pointed out in frustration.

“I don’t consider this a waste of time,” the supervisor said.

“That’s because you’re getting paid to do it,” I said. “Who’s paying me? Do I get to deduct my hourly rate from my Comcast bill?”

That’s what “customer service” has come to — nothing, not even a vague memory of taking care of the people who pay for your goods or services.

How can an email provider that offers up to six mailboxes per account fail to recognize that some — many? most? — of their clients will need to bounce back and forth between those boxes. Or that millions of their customers aren’t jealously guarding their stupid Comcast accounts from the middle of a busy workplace, but casually working out of a home office where signing on and signing off ad nauseum represent bad service, not good security.

But what are my choices? Find new email software or another carrier and switch over to new addresses or, at the very least, lose every address and important email I’ve stored for years?

Tell Comcast to take a hike, transfer my business to a different company and deal with all of the above plus the need for new hookups?

I’ve been down this road before, and it’s pocked with more aggravation than anyone should have to spend long hours handling.

So maybe I’ll content myself for now with dissing Comcast at every chance I get. Via email and the internet, of course.