.SOMETIMES RAW.

via The New Yorker

Have you ever been on hold for over one hour with your bank? My reason: subscriptions of a website I love to read ran out and cannot be renewed because my card was declined. For no reason! So, I called the 24-hour service hotline written with fat letters on the back of my bank card for help. Obviously, as one does. One problem I have is that more and more people get replaced by machines. Supermarkets, you name it. Robots and AI will rule the world eventually. To talk to a human being on a service hotline is almost impossible. This is what happened when I called my bank:

Thank you for dialing Bank A. Your call is very important to us. Please listen carefully, as our options have recently changed.

How can we assist you today? Please tell us what your concern is. To hear about our new payment options, press 1. Are you tired of long response times? Pulling your hair out because your card does not work even though it is full of your hard-earned money and nothing seems to be the problem? Consider upgrading to Bank A+ today. Jump the line for just 19.99 Euro per month. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind and freedom. Why did you say “nervous breakdown” when we asked you how we can assist you? This is not how this works.

To log in to your bank account, press 2. Please have your username, password, and secondary device ready for two-factor authentication. To create a new account, press #. No emergency assistance will be sent to users without a verified account.

To speak with Reguigui, our new Indian speaking AI response assistant, press 3. This portion of the call will be monitored, but Bank A is not responsible for anything Reguigui may say or imply about your racial background. Recording conversations with Reguigui is strictly prohibited, and posting videos of you calling Reguigui insults will result in a fifteen-minute response delay during your next call. We promise it’s not worth it.

Please note: Attempting to speak with a live representative now incurs a five-euro convenience fee. Let’s see how long you can “hold the line”. We will play some nice elevator music on repeat until foam starts to build around your mouth.

To access our payment management portal, press 4. Paying for your bills online has never been easier.

To listen to some soothing Austrian folk music, press 5. You will be charged by the minute. (At this point I was on hold for 38! minutes and fuming!)

To report a crime in progress, please submit a recent bank statement and a professional reference from your employer. Once Reguigui confirms you meet our income threshold, press 6. To skip this step, press 1 and subscribe to Bank A+ today. Once again, we are not responsible for any weird sexual comments Reguigui may make during this process.

To invest in Bank A-Coins, press 7. We don’t know what they are useful for either.

To report a bank card theft, press 8. After several brief thirty-second ads, you’ll be redirected to an theft response professional. For legal reasons, we are required to inform you that said professional will be Reguigui.

To speak to a bank professional manager, go find one yourself out there. What, you want us to hold your hand through the whole thing? What are you, some kind of weirdo? Press 9 to add a fifty-euro “wealth redistribution” charge to your account, since you like our bank so much.

Press 0 to give up and disconnect the call. This will also charge ten euros to your account.

To speak to a human being, press 10. That’s the 1 key followed by the 0 key. This will definitely not take you to the Bank A+ subscription menu and charge you ten euros.

Stay on the line to engage in phone sex with Reguigui. Your call may be recorded for quality assurance and for Reguigui’s personal collection.

To hear these options again, beg. Get on your knees and beg.

Louder…

Louder…

There we go. Unfortunately, you took too long. Here comes Reguigui. We hope you like to play.

And again, thank you so much for your call. It is truly important to us. Please take our survey which we will send you to all your emails listed with us. We appreciate your phone call.

via The New Yorker and Rebecca Dunlap

I’ve finally arrived. That’s right, it’s me, your bloodwork results, in your inbox three days after that chatty nurse couldn’t find your vein and left you with a tricolor bruise. I think it’s time you open me up, for inside, I have all the health-related answers you’re seeking.

First and foremost, you’ll have to log on with a password that you have long forgotten. I’ll wait as you do your two-step authentication. I promise I am worth the wait. This is serious business after all. This is life or death.

When you open me, you might be looking for a spot where someone, anyone, ideally the doctor, explains me to you. It gives me more pleasure than I care to admit that there will be none of that here. There is no one here to handhold you. You’re on your own, and I don’t owe you shit. You probably should have gone to med school like your parents secretly hoped for.

I will, however, throw you a bone and color-code myself for you. Anything in bright red will seem concerning to you, and perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t. Who am I to say? And who are you to say? I will explicitly state that some of your blood levels fall under the “normal” values, and others above the “normal” values, and either that means you are dying or that you just need to eat some spinach. Oh, you want me to tell you which it is? Ha. That’s funny. Why would I do that? Why would I ever want to dumb myself down for you?

As you can see, I also threw in some confusing words, such as “unremarkable” or “abnormal,” to give you a little extra shock and fear. Fun, right? I want this to be a maze for you, a challenge. I want you to work for the answers about your own body. And quite frankly, I want you to live in fear.

What you can and will undoubtedly do is google the specific blood tests and what your results possibly mean, and please, go at it. It will leave you with more questions than answers. It will likely make you draw conclusions that feed your anxiety. Perhaps it will leave you with images of illnesses that will forever be burned into your memory. I could only hope that is the case.

You’re probably thinking, Screw you, my doctor would tell me if something was really wrong, or else they wouldn’t have sent these. But do you know that for sure? Did you also google that? Because there sure are a lot of numbers here and a lot of arrows up and down and big words that I know you will never be able to pronounce or even grasp, so you might want to rethink that thought process. But hey, what do I know?

Oh right. Everything. I know it all.

Well, now that you’ve pored over me and have convinced yourself you have six months left to live, my work here as an agent of chaos is over. And soon your time on earth will be too. Or it won’t. Again: I will never tell.

So, yesterday evening I attended a lecture on AI, and I have to say that many things I heard are a bit scary. For example, AI can write an entire novel within 20 seconds. All I need to do is type, for example, Stephen King-style, 90,000 words, keywords: woods, scary, friendship, death, and monster. I will receive a full manuscript of a novel that, 20 pages in, sounds amazing. Makes me wonder, will we need authors in the future? Will we need humans in stores, or can robots do the job? They are sort of doing it already anyway. Some strange future we are heading to, don’t you think? It obviously has many good sides as well. Maybe it can assist in finding a cure for AIDS or cancer. However, for now, there are still things artificial intelligence cannot which puts humans still in charge. For now.

Experience a heart attack while working in the herb garden.

Get a divorce.

Put too many kernels in the pan to make popcorn because I wanted MORE popcorn, and then I got LESS because half of them fell out! #irony #metaphor

Wonder what its middle school bully is doing now.

Show up to court in a white linen suit.

Drape myself face down on an ottoman in a fit of ennui.

Adjourn to the reading room for tea and cookies.

Yawn, flick the middle finger, or kiss.

Suspect that something evil has happened in this very room.

Fall for a red-flag person.

Lose its sense of time in The New York Times and miss one’s flight.

Have a least-favorite roommate.

Admire the voluptuous nature of a cloud.

Climax in unison with its lover.

Obtain a meditative state and lose it.

Extend a too-firm handshake to someone you don’t like.

Swiftly transition from self-loathing to acceptance at the sight of its dead and wrongly planted fig plant.

Rid itself of the feeling that a yoga retreat is a scam.

Chug a Tequila Sunrise Cocktail in front of everyone.

Become shy about seeing two people sexually, tongue kissing.

Give it all up for someone.

Continue feeling shame for something it did in fourth grade.

Weep over sins that are not its own.

Tokyo Drift a shopping cart around the grocery store.

Clean effectively.

Fight back movie-induced tears.

Surrender to the currents of the great unknown through the steady brown eyes of someone special.

Ride a desert horse atop the high isolated hills, leaving behind a red cloud of dust and a dark past.

Avoid eye contact with the one person who you know who knows the answer.

Pace.

Flail.

Sashay.

Understand and respect pure charisma.

Reassess its sexuality after watching a video of a rug being steam cleaned.

Learn more about itself through the years with a partner.

Appreciate a well-tailored suit.

Lean against an office window sill that overlooks the city skyline and wonder what it’s all for.

Wake up in a driveway.

Multitask.

Make moral judgements.

Feel.

Forget the names of everyone who works with you.

Worry that the friend group they are meant to have is somewhere else.

Employ a diet that is maintained through persistent self-hate.

Suffer from seasonal unease.

Succumb to an ice-cream bar.