It had been a tough week all around and the last thing I needed was a letter from the phone company politely informing me that my ex-roommate had left me saddled with a large long distance bill that I needed to pay immediately and in person, lest my service be interrupted. A call to their billing office yielded nothing more than polite but firm insistence that I must pay in person and that it had to happen more or less immediately. Resignedly, I made an appointment for the next day.
The next day, as my co-workers huddled around the lunch wagon, I ran to my car and raced to the phone company offices, figuring that if everything went smoothly and I didn’t get pulled over for speeding, I’d have time to pay the bill and grab some fast food to wolf down during the drive back. I made it there in record time and without breaking many traffic laws and scurried inside. Pushing through the second set of doors, I quickly brushed by the line of walk-ins.
“Ma’am,” said I in a voice that I thought conveyed the perfect mix of deference to her exalted position and harried stress at being delayed by having to detour around the line of ThoseWhoSimplyWalkedIn. “Ma’am,” I asked the petulant looking beauty school dropout behind the counter,” can you tell me where to go for a twelve-fifteen appointment with the billing supervisor?” The chill that ran down my spine was caused less by her disgusted sneer than by the sound of a watery chuckle from a man about halfway back in the ever-growing queue. When I looked at him, the man shrugged sympathetically.
“I’m 12 noon. The people in front of me are eleven-forty-five. is somewhere back there.” And my gaze followed his jerked thumb, taking in a line that now stretched out the door through which I had originally entered.
“Sir, please step aside,” said the big-haired creature behind the counter.
In a flash of recognition and resignation, I realized how completely I’d been had. Checking my watch as I slunk to the end and observing the line’s progress for a few minutes, I knew there was no way I was going to get back to work on time, much less stop for sustenance along the way. Worst of all, my boss had bet me I wouldn’t make it back in less than two hours and it looked like I was in grave danger of owing him a lunch.
It took forty minutes to reach the head of that line, forty minutes of quietly seething at having been suckered, first by my scofflaw ex-roommate, and now by one of his creditors. I resented the stares of the deadbeats around me, knowing that I was not really one of THEM. I paid my bills and it was only through the perfidy of one like THEM that I found myself cooling my heels in their company. When finally my turn came at the counter, I requested through clenched teeth that I be allowed to speak to the billing supervisor. Now. The harridan simply held out her hand for my paperwork.
“You don’t understand I am here to discuss a bill…”
“With the billing supervisor, I know. May I see your bill, please?”
I handed it over reluctantly, and she barely glanced at it before thrusting it back at me, flipping a small green pre-printed card on top. She pointed at a bank of phones on the wall, into which several of my former line-mates were speaking in varying degrees of exasperation.
“Go over to one of the white phones and dial the number on the green card.”
I stared, first at the card, then at the bank of phones, then back at the girl behind the counter.
“Why do I need…”
“Sir, I have a line waiting here…” (a thoroughly superfluous bit of information at this point, I can assure you)
“I’m not going to meet with a billing supervisor?”
“Dial the number and you’ll be talking to one. Next, please.”
By now, I was not interested in keeping my cool, not concerned with avoiding a scene and completely uninterested in arguing with the young, er, lady. I suggested that she call into the back room for a supervisor because until I was face to face with a supervisor, I was not going to relinquish my place before her. And it was at that moment that I decided a concert was called for.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, turning to face my line-mates, “I propose to entertain you until such time as a supervisor comes out here to meet with me. Please feel free to join in.”
I’m no opera star but I do sing loudly. I got about halfway through The Battle Hymn Of The Republic before the door behind the ‘customer service agent’ slammed open and a middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks came out from wherever they kept their ruddy-cheeked middle-aged supervisors, glancing around for a moment, taking in the line of half-laughing and half-angry fellow late-bill-payers and please-turn-on-my phoners before turning to face me with a loud, disapproving sniff.
“Is there a problem here, sir?”
Not wanting him to feel deprived, I finished the “sounding forth the trumpet” verse before interrupting my performance. I handed him my paperwork and my check, informed him that he was now almost an hour late for my 12:15pm appointment, and would he please process my paperwork and hand me my receipt. I further informed him that failing satisfaction, I was prepared to offer next a nice medley of Peter, Paul and Mary songs. Or perhaps a few hundred rounds of The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.
He actually ripped the receipt; he signed it so hard and fast. And I turned to walk out past the line of co-waiters, some laughing their keesters off and others glaring at me with looks that could definitely kill. I heard the whoosh-click as the supervisor disappeared once more into the back room.
And then it happened. It was the guy behind me in line who supplied the punch line, just as I started to push open the door to freedom.
“Are you gonna go get that guy back, or do I have to sing a song, too?”
True story.
What you fail to mention was that it happened 30 years ago when you were young and brash, not the kindly old fart you are today.
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