We need to change the change bill to information on the main frame of the skeleton of the system.”

That indecipherable bit of information from my Comcast customer representative regarding my request to take my name off the account just about sums up what it means to be an Island shuffler.

It is not just physically moving from a palatial, three-bedroom home overlooking the Vineyard Haven harbor to a one-bedroom guest house the size of the Apollo 13 capsule (after jettisoning the lunar module). Don’t get me wrong: The guest house is cute, clean and in a great Edgartown location. But for the next five months, my wife and I and our disabled rat terrier — and occasionally, our sometimes rock star son — will get to know each other really, really well. Then the schedule calls for us to move back into the Vineyard Haven estate in October, where we can choose to not see each other for hours, or days, at a time (of course we won’t want that, honey . . . honey?).

But the Vineyard shuffle reaches beyond the physical aspects of carting your belongings from one stranger’s house to another. Not unlike the Cape shuffle, which I did frequently for the two years prior to my move to the Island — seven times to be exact — it can be a disorienting, sometimes degrading exercise that usually involves moving from a roomy, well-appointed winter rental at a reasonable price to a smaller, more rustic structure for more money. Regarding that last point, we were lucky with the Edgartown guest house, which may be one of the few summer rentals going for less than $5 billion a week.

I am not your typical shuffler. First of all, I’m more than, ahem, a few years out of college. Second, we own a home outside of Los Angeles, where we spent most of the last 25 years, which is the main reason we cannot afford to buy another home and must rent. (To make matters even more convoluted, we are trying to rent out our Los Angeles home for the first time.)

After 30 years of being a homeowner, the act of renting by itself is a humbling experience, although I suppose I could give it a positive spin by saying it does kind of make you feel like a college kid again. In the last three years, I will have lived in nine different places, counting this summer’s rental. That’s exactly five more than my 26-year-old daughter and 24-year-old son combined. I’d be inclined to start borrowing money from them, if they had any.

Shuffling usually involves renting a van to move our stuff, which by now has been carted from California to Falmouth to another house in Falmouth to another house in Falmouth to New Seabury to Woods Hole, back to the first New Seabury house to another house in New Seabury to Vineyard Haven and finally to Edgartown. No van this summer, though — we can handle this baby in, maybe, 20 to 25 trips with my Altima.

I’ll also need to get my bicycle to the new guest house. We don’t have a bike carrier on the car, but I was looking forward to the cross-Island cycle anyway. Of course, that was until last Sunday when I teed off at the first hole at Farm Neck and my left knee caved in like a Red Sox relief pitcher. The doctor says just another month of physical therapy (I just finished two months of PT for a back injury) for that and I’ll be good to go. So, I’ll have to rely on my wife to carry much of the load in the usual parade of yard-size trash bags and cardboard boxes. With a titanium rod and cadaver bone fused in place of the three cervical vertebrae removed from her neck, she seems the perfect candidate to handle the heavy lifting. (At a follow-up exam a few months after her operation, her surgeon spotted a suspicious feature on her X-ray and said, “Technically, you have a broken neck. Bummer.” Bet you’ll never find that particular medical opinion from an East Coast doctor.) Our son will help, of course — that is if we can catch him during his daily three and a half-hour period of wakefulness.

Then there are the bureaucratic details, such as discontinuing and then initiating utilities, cable and garbage pick up. This brings me back to my Comcast conversation, which was actually almost pleasant, compared to what I anticipated. My customer representative, we’ll call him Carl, was accommodating, even with the cable jargon he lapsed into occasionally. He even gave me his direct number should I need to restart service in the future. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my cable is all paid for under the terms of our cottage rental this summer.

As much as we are looking forward to a beautiful, bustling summer in Edgartown and a return the Vineyard Haven house, I don’t want to go anywhere again after that. I’ve had it with the Vineyard shuffle — even though this is my first — the Cape shuffle and the California shuffle.

After a certain point, you just don’t want to get lost in the shuffle.