Have I mentioned that I don’t have a bank card? I’m sorry to keep harping on about this, but it’s amazing how inconvenient it can be to attempt to survive in a capitalist society with no available means of exchange. In other words, GOSH SOME FOOD WOULD BE NICE RIGHT NOW! WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE GIVE ME SOME FOOD?
For the record, I reported my card stolen on April 2, engaging in the usual fruitless debate with the customer service drone: “Please can you send the card to my office?” “No, we have to send it to your house by recorded delivery.” “But I can’t get recorded delivery at my house because I’m not at my house. I’m at my office. Please can you send it to my office?” “No.” “Please? Pretty please?” “No.” “Why do you torment me so?” “Because I have no soul.” I expected to receive a delivery slip sometime before April 9 telling me that the postman had knocked (twice) on my door, shiny new bank card in hand, only to discover that surprise! I was not there!
This didn’t happen.
On April 11 I called to ask why I hadn’t received my new card. “You haven’t received it?” said a listless robot, sounding not even remotely concerned about my lack of economic viability. “Oh. We’ll send you another one.” This wasn’t exactly the response I’d been hoping for, but at least I hadn’t been told to submit a request by post, or to go fetch my new card in person from a customer service facility located on a remote mountain peak accessible only to trained Sherpas and certain species of goat. “Thank you,” I said politely, and bashed the receiver against my skull before hanging up in a vain attempt to transmit some of my agony over the line.
Again I waited, the unspoken tension and interminable tedium rendering my life akin to a Victorian novel, except without any chivalrous gentlemen in tailored waistcoats sending me pointed looks of repressed longing from across the drawing room. Again I received no fucking bank card. SiC and I were now reduced to surreptitiously sidling up to cashpoint machines, credit cards concealed in our hands, in the hopes that the machines wouldn’t see us coming and immediately self-immolate in the negative force field created by our combined credit ratings.
This morning, with an increasingly acute sense of irony, I dialled the bank’s ‘helpline’ yet again. I got a passable facsimile of a human being on the phone this time who informed me that while the second card was still drifting somewhere in the ether of subspace, the first card had for some reason been sent to my branch. “Have they called to notify you that something has been delivered?” she asked.
I laughed the hollow laugh of the damned. “Strangely enough, they haven’t.”
I called my branch. “We’re not open yet,” I was told. (“Then why did you pick up the phone?” I didn’t ask.) “We’re having a branch meeting first thing, but I’ll call you back in about twenty minutes.”
After an hour, I called again and got a different drone. “Let me just check and see if it’s been delivered,” she intoned lifelessly. After a few minutes of vague rustling, she picked up the phone again. “Um, the man who has the keys to the cabinet isn’t in today so I can’t open it. Could you call back tomorrow?”
At this point I finally lost my mind. “I’M EATING GRASS CLIPPINGS TO SURVIVE!” I screamed. “IF I DON’T GET SOME BEER SOON I’M GOING TO FUCK YOUR MOTHER WITH MY GARDENING SHEARS! JUST BASH THE DOOR OPEN WITH YOUR FUCKING USELESS SKULL, YOU GODDAMN RETARD!”
All right, no I didn’t.
“OK, thanks,” I said, and then I gently put down the phone, crawled under my desk and twitched for a while. Then I cut a panel off a cardboard box and wrote on it in big black letters, “Will write scathing editorial for food.”
I’m off to find a nice street corner! Enjoy your weekends.