It’s the most striking thing. When you speak with a hospital billing representative who is constantly being recorded, timed, and censored - not to mention mistreated by the most disturbing examples of god’s handiwork on a daily basis, it is like communion with a ghost, a crossing of the veil with a shade rendered insensate by the shackles of infinity. Stripped of all memory, feeling, and mentation, they routinely repeat themselves and forget nearly everything you tell them.

They will terrorise you with outdated information, demand months or longer to respond to any request, transfer you to someone even more psychically hollow, and fail entirely to read or write any notes from your previous calls from the last six weeks.

I wish that instead of a VOIP client, my phone was designed by Egon Spengler to entrap such nightmares. They would be better looked after in an ecto-containment unit by my desk, I think.