I am waiting on hold. Caught in the twisted, tormenting, telephonic wires of time and space, under a looming dark cloud of growing stomach-pit stress and anxiety. I am on tender hooks. To discuss financial black holes and red-letter days with a government rep, and – I holler out to the universe – a real-life human of the species.
I visualise a masked, grimaced face of human anonymity, gainfully employed, digitally manacled to a fake wooden desk, in a remote call centre, ironically housed somewhere in the benefit poverty backwaters of South Wales.
Time then, I feel, to assess the poorly and incapacitated bottom line of today’s bank balance. The fleeting moments in the black are long-gone, and today’s numbers have an inky red disposition, requiring financial resuscitation and a breath of life, at the arse-end of the month when the financial wolf packs are braying at the banks automatic sliding doors and ATM’s.
Waiting in the telephone queue, I am screened and identified by a series of AI bots, frisked, and shaken down for all the pennies I have in my pockets.
Thoughts turn on a six-pence, to plastic credit cards doled out on the cheap, mounting interest mountains on the horizon, and swampy rising waters of debt – a financial pay-back from thirteen years wandering incapacitated through the suffocating heat of the welfare desert, looking for leafy shade under its naked money trees.
I imagine life’s circuitous journey: to navigate and slave along its devious money trails from the cradle to the grave; leaving only heavy pound-shaped footprints on its dusty barren roads; and chasing the lucid financial dream of making it to the life.
After a half-hour of wretched contemplation in the hole of the hold – a welcome human voice comes on the line, a lone oasis of Welsh kindness – in the wilderness of AI bots, cold voice recognition comfort, and soulless repeat hold mantras.
And I picture myself, cap in hand. Oliver Twist, at the frontline of the digital poor house, waiting for a sloppy serving of financial gruel from a faceless state official.
I feel an adrenalin cocktail of panic and injured pride, waiting for a green light from the system to plug my financial black hole.
What if the computer says NO?
The kindly Welsh operator is navigating the system, resolving the payment issue, concluding before too long there has been an error on the networks.
The computer says YES!
I feel a euphoric rush of blood to the head, mentally place the cap back on my head, and go in search of a brew.
Flicking through the socials, in a quiet lull of the afternoon when even the birds have stopped their spiralling flights over the rooftops, I feel a piece of peace descend over the estate and streets beyond.
A viral video pops up, of an endless street-by-street queue for a foodbank sandwiched somewhere in a struggling inner-city borough, and I wonder how the system is labouring to feed itself under the blackout of total darkness.
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