When Businesses Answered Phones, and Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth!

A Woman of Another Era
Answering a Telephone

I've been too depressed to blog much lately. The atrocious debt ceiling sell out, the stock market crash, the continued attacks on workers rights, immigrant rights, LGBT rights, all these things have been weighing on me making it difficult to sit at the keyboard to write anything.

I've also been dealing with some health issues; not the life-threatening kind but the exhausting kind that require a complex orchestration of  faxes from my primary care provider along  with a highly complex choreography of appointments with specialists. A total production that is not getting rave reviews from the critics.

I have joked that I have a managed care health insurance plan, as long as I play the role of manager. Getting a medical problem that requires specialists treated is every bit as consuming as trying to fight identity theft, foreclosure or anything else requiring a strictly synchonized string of telephone calls.

As a boomer, I can remember a prehistoric time before answering machines, when a person could call offices during business hours and actually speak to a human being. In the eighties and nineties this feat was still possible. With the coming of the aughts and the great recession on its heels, it is now officially impossible to make phone calls directly to human beings, no matter what time of the day they are placed.

Now I understand why folks abrasively answer their cell phones at the most inopportune moments and we are all forced to listen to the intimate psychological details of their relationships on public transportation, in waiting rooms and at the supermarket. I haven't sunk to that level yet, but, in order to get my medical problem resolved, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that this rudeness is what I may have to resort to.