Well today started out pretty bad, but I think I got some perspective from it.

There has been a collection company that got my phone number from their database listings as being a potential point of contact to track down their debtor. Great, just what I need to deal with is another phone tree where I am put on hold so that I can tell them to stop calling me. They called 9 times before I got sick of deleting their messages and called them.

So I call them up and ask "hey what is the deal here? Why are you calling me? I have nothing to do with this person and you keep calling me." So the guy on the other end says, "well our database matches similar names and calls people who *may* be related.

I started turning red instantly. So I said to the guy, "Ok let me get this strait you harass people who's names are nothing more than similar to the people you are looking for?", and he says "get your vocabulary straight mister, its not harassment, all you have to do is call us and we'll leave you alone".

Am I the only one who thinks this is absurd?

Well I told the guy I wanted to make a formal complaint and he just hung up on me. So I call back and ask to talk to a manager, she hangs up on me when I ask to file a complaint. Ok so the next part of this seems insane but it really happened, it goes all the way up the chain, each one as rude as or ruder than the previous all the way up to the General Manager.

I explain that I am planning on investigating the legality of their business practices, and that the main reason was that his entire company treated me without respect or dignity. At first he was just as big a jerk as the rest of them and asking "are you harassing us?", I said "no I am escalating". After 15 minutes of explaining where I was coming from he did the previously unthinkable: he apologized.

Is it really that hard? Really I never would have wasted my, his and all of his employees time if they had just been willing to show a bit of humanity, and compassion. I was fighting against the machine of dehumanizing phone operators whose psychic message tells you to talk to the hand. The anti life equation, the same equation that let us slaughter each other in grand numbers, the same equation that lets us step over the homeless on our way to the sushi restaurant.

This whole line made me put things into perspective though, my life is pretty good. I am not starving. I am not a political prisoner. I have goals and some sense of purpose. I have a girlfriend who I love, man I am really lucky! So if the whole of my problems is that some stupid collection agency in Florida treated me badly then my problems are probably pretty small.