When Writing Turns to Whac-A-Mole

By Carol Mell, 8-30-07

	Caption: As soon as I find my glasses and get these whackos off the phone I'll write. I just hope the Apocalypse doesn't happen until after my vacation.

Writing comes harder in summertime but this year is the worst. 

First, I can’t find my glasses, not the super expensive tri-focals with the magnetic sunglasses, just the ordinary reading glasses I use at the computer. So, I mill around the house, cycling clockwise and counter, scanning the waist-high surfaces. Thunder is rumbling close and I may have only one hour until I must turn the computer off before it fries in a wrathful stroke of God.

The phone rings and I answer because, according to the law of discoveries that occur only when you’re not trying, I think a small distraction from the eyeglass search might make them appear. 

“Hello?” I answer.

“Paco?” a male voice asks.

“No, there’s no Paco here.”

“Who are you?” the male voice now asks in Spanish.

I switch languages but avoid the question with, “Paco doesn’t live here.”

“He’s moved? Where?”

“How should I know? You have a wrong number.”

“He changed his number, too? What’s his new number?”

“Look, I don’t know Paco.”

“Man, that is harsh. You were living together only last week.”

“Tell me what number you were calling?” I ask, changing tactics.

“I called Paco’s number.”

“Yeah, but what number was that?”

“I don’t know. He changed it. Don’t you have it?”

“Why would I have Paco’s number? I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wait, don’t hang up. I gotta find Paco.”

“Paco is not at this number,” I say and then I hang up.

The phone rings, “Hello.”

“Orale, Paco, why’d your old lady kick you out?”

Feeling like Alice way through the looking glass, I hang up a second time but, next to the phone, I spot my glasses. I head to my desk with determination but before I can write I decide to make just one quick phone call about that medical lab bill I’ve been receiving every month since last November for $79.83. The insurance should have covered it. I already called them but the operator there advised me to call the lab.

Three times now I’ve called but I always get a recording asking me to leave a phone number. Nobody calls back.

Between my health insurance, the medical lab and the search for Paco I feel like a kid at the carnival playing an infuriating round of Whac-a-Mole. I’ve been trying to take care of this bill for nine months. To protect my health I’ll have to do the lab test again in just three months unless the stress of dealing with the paperwork aftermath from the last test kills me first.

Today, because this is my eighth bill and fourth call, I’m attempting to work myself into a state, hoping to sound angry enough on the machine to provoke a response. With my good-natured karma I feel sheepish doing “indignant” but listening to the Muzak version of “Yesterday” in on-hold limbo helps the indignation along. 

I rehearse while I’m waiting, “I should be writing now but instead I am forced to call you for the umpty-umpth time and how come no one ever answers the phone. Etc, etc,” but lo and behold a virtual person answers. Her name is Cathy B. As I launch into my angry spiel, Cathy B. in Albuquerque turns the victimhood tide around faster than Moses closed the Red Sea on those Egyptians. She tells me these last few months have been terrible due to staff layoffs leaving her with an insane workload. In the end, instead of the decent firing and unemployment, she was kept on in labor purgatory.

“I can’t hear you,” I say, “you keep fading out.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Cathy B. answers. “These phone systems must be nine years old. I don’t know how they expect us to work like this.”

Cathy B. says medical billing is about to get so much worse because of new regulations causing no one to know who is billing whom for what.

“You should write about that,” she says, “but it won’t matter anyway because all the signs are there in the Bible, the Apocalypse is coming.”

I’m hoping the destruction of the world can wait until after my vacation but just then the thunder grumbles to emphasize her point. “That’s rough,” I hear myself sympathizing, wondering how I can bring the end time down on the conversation, “but can we get back to my bill?”

She says she’ll have to research my file, which by the sound of it went down with the Titanic, but agrees to put a note on my file not to send me to Collections.

The thing about Whac-a-Mole is the mole always wins, even when you hit him he is already on his way down. If by chance you do bash in his skull, you feel terrible for hitting a defenseless creature.

The thunder sounds, like the last trumpet, and my computer is down for the day. I hope Paco isn’t out in this stuff but you know on Humbug Mountain you’re danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well.