Dubious Quality

I went through quite a bit of this in the first six months after Gloria's death. It seemed like most weeks I was encountering some inexplicable corporate policy that no one working at the particular corporation could even explain. It was darkly funny, as death often is, and as long as you can laugh at some of these things, you're not lost. 

If you stop laughing completely, I assume you're in deep trouble, but fortunately, I never reached that point. Even in the worst moments, I was able to laugh at the utterly ridiculous. 

I shielded Eli 21.4 from the bureaucracy of death as much as humanly possible. He was at Oxford, trying to take advantage of the greatest educational opportunity anyone could ever have, and my job was to carry everything else so he could grieve and somehow still succeed. 

Which he did. That boy has a quality, as we all know. 

Last week, though, he encountered one of these situations himself. It involved him terminating his Verizon account, which had been a sub-account of his mom's. Through a frankly incredible series of mistakes by Verizon, he was still getting billed after his account was cancelled, but the bill was being sent to Gloria, because it was her name as the owner of the account. 

Among many stupidities in this case, I'd spent hours with Verizon in December a year ago clarifying all this, taking official documents, etc., and they'd still managed to totally screw it up. 

Eli went down to the local Verizon office to straighten it out. They said he had to talk to support (apparently the store doesn't offer that particular kind of billing "support"), so he called from the store. He was then talking to various reps on the phone for almost an hour, long after the store had closed. 

A well-established feature of the death bureaucracy: endless shuffling between departments. 

The last rep he talked to kept saying Gloria needed to be responsible for the bill, even though Eli had told him several times that she'd passed away. Finally, the rep said it one more time, like repeating a mantra, and Eli finally  lost his patience. He said (with a raised voice), "Gloria's dead! She is no longer living. She has been dead for quite some time!"

He said he felt like he was in the Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch. Behind him, the reps still in the store (who were quite invested now) burst into laughter.

There was a long, long pause on the phone, lasting almost ten seconds. Then the rep said, "Yes, sir, we'll take care of it."

Laughing at the ridiculous moments feels good. Sometimes, it's your only weapon.