10:14 p.m. Ok. It's been at least 24 entire hours, and the AOL thing is still bothering me. Mightily. Permit me to rant.

First, I'm embarrassed to reveal that when I first heard it in the morning, tossed casually into the hello/goodbye conversation as Igor sped out the door, I thought nothing of it. I completed my yawn, my coffee, my morning surf and mirth.

It was only in the late afternoon, while I was at Xeney's weblog, purely for the entertainment value, that I finally got it. Leave it to a woman to phrase it most succinctly. AOL has bought Time-Warner.

Now, we've done a lot of work for Time-Warner. Time-Warner signs our checks. They are a big company. They would actually be considered one of our many bosses. As for AOL: I laugh in its general direction.

AOL only means one thing to me: Goo Gone.

Anyway, I was reading the weblog and I suddenly realized that it wasn't Time-Warner who was buying (and then mercy-killing) the lame, stupid waste-of-time that is AOL, but actually, quite the opposite.

How can this be? It's only money. It's only money on paper. Could they really have more money than Time-Warner? Warner Brothers? InStyle Magazine? ESPN? MTV? How can this be?

It's money collected from all those people, including me, who have given up ever getting off the service because you have to make them take you off. Make them forget they ever saw your credit-card number. Do you know how many months, @$19.95, must go by for how many millions of people who have better things to do than wait on hold and send emails into black accounting holes?

It adds up. Apparently.

Does this mean that my cable system, which I think might be owned by Time-Warner, will now force me to use Netscape as my browser? Now that I've just switched? They made me use Microsoft's Outlook when I signed up because they "didn't support" Eudora. I had a terrible time moving things over. But I had no choice.

Do you know what Outlook can do to a Macintosh system? Yesterday, as part of an ill-advised upgrade to Outlook 5.0, I had to zap my pram more than once -- in addition to rebuilding my desktop countless times -- and I still couldn't get things back to normal. Email is floating everywhere. Old stuff pops up. New stuff gets lost. It doesn't know my name.

Oh, I lament. So much money floating around, and all because of the internet. How can this be? I tried, for at least six long brutal months in 1994, to get some kind of internet business started. I know now that I gave up too easily, but really. I really, really tried.

I'm just one woman with too-blonde hair and an inappropriate pitching technique. I couldn't interest Hewlett-Packard in getting on the web. Nor Toyota. Nor some local banks. Forget the publishing industry. I gave a presentation to the DEA in Washington. Nope, nope, not interested, no. We're staying with CD-roms. They're the coming thing.

Oh, I gave up too easily. I am not rich today.

I was right all along about the shape of things to come, but I couldn't package it in small enough pre-chewed bytes. I couldn't depend on the phone connection to hold up in the middle of slide shows. I even had a meeting with the EarthLink people when they were first starting out and looking for free space to stash a few servers, but I couldn't interest them in setting up their own web presence.

In fact, I ended up, for a time, making some interactive software for a comic-book company and I had to make a lot of demos of the presentation on floppy disks. These things cost money ... and I was not getting paid that much.

That's when I found out that you could, indeed, get those recalcitrant labels off the freebie AOL disks if you had a big bottle of Goo Gone and a lot of time and desk space. You really had to pick and pry and supersaturate the labels, and eventually they did, indeed, finally come clean.

That's the only time I've ever had any success with AOL.

You can't be bitter if you give up. I gave up.

Younger women these days are not giving up so easily. Girls still in braces are taking programming courses in college. I'm glad. Even my mother has been on the internet now -- once. She has seen it with her own eyes. She thought I'd gone completely mad for a time.

Now she knows. I'm not mad; I'm peeved. At myself. For giving up. If I'd been as relentless with my dealmaking as I have been with my label-removing, I'd be a wealthy woman today.

Yeah, yeah. Rich. You know what? If I could go back to 1994, I don't think I would change a thing. And do you know why? Because all those decisions got me where I am today.

Here. Now. In the rather lucky position of writing this column about not being rich.