Thank you for your insights. Just to wrap up my own experience, I nearly simultaneously received a phone call from Visa (a real person!) saying they were crediting my account back the payment to MIS and a real email from MIS saying, again, it was shipped. No comment on my repeated cancellation requests. There was one piece of insight, the sender said that if you respond to their support ticket emails, it automatically sends you to the back of the queue. And, I suppose, sends you another automatic service request status email. Real possibility of an infinite loop here...:8)
In any case, I'm going to pass on future work with MIS and go down one of the alternative avenues suggested here. First, I think I'll get a basic refillable kit from Cone. I would prefer to be able print on multiple paper types but will move my questions on that to another thread...I think I've taken enough of everyone's bandwidth on this slow slog with MIS. BTW, thanks for all the thoughtful comments!