Dealing With Devils

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This Everyday Anxiety contains

The cruelty inherent to the system, no explicit violence this month.

“Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us. If you’re having an issue in any of the following processes, you might be able to find the answer to your question on our website—”

It makes her want to stab herself in the ears. She hits the speaker icon on her screen and let the phone rest on the coffee table next to her, flexing her wrist to alleviate the ache in her muscles. 

The fact that she’s had to spend four hours on hold between various people, not even to try and get more money or change the type of assistance she was on, just to keep receiving the same kinds of payments—

She swallows the anger and annoyance down her throat like so much bile, shuts her eyes, and tilts her head back to count to ten. It’s a waste of time to get angry. The government doesn’t care. The system is too big. The people manning the phone lines can’t change it any more than she can. 

“—lo? Excuse me?”

The risk of them hanging up is too great and she seizes on her phone again. “Hi, hello, I’m here!”

“Ah, hello,” says the voice with the audacity to sound irritated. “You’ve reached the enquiries line for disability payments—”

“Great,” she says, feeling another wave of fatigue fall over her. “I’ve been transferred to the wrong line, I’m looking for—”

“It happens,” they say, tone indifferent. “So, what you need to do is hang up and then call back on the general enquiries line so they can direct you more accurately—”

The wave of despair that swells up her throat at the thought of another four hours on hold to get to this point almost catches her, makes her hesitate, and she finds herself blurting: “No-no-no, please, no, don’t hang up, please!”

 “Ma’am, if you’re not meant to be on this line—”

“Can you transfer me to—”

There’s a loud sigh, and an agonisingly long pause, but when she pulls the phone away to check the connection is still active the tinny noise of hold music starts up again. 

It takes an excruciatingly nerve-wracking thirty seven minutes for the phone to be answered again, and a pitfall stomach drop when the kinder man on the other end informs her that while technically she is on the right line, he isn’t actually authorised to click the box on her payments or even confirm that she’ll be permitted, but just between them, he’s pretty sure she’ll be fine and he’s going to send her up the tree to his supervisor to make sure. 

Twelve minutes, and there’s a terse supervisor letting her know that her payments are being halted because she hasn’t called before the cut off. When she clarifies that the cut off is still three days away there’s a frustrated sigh and she’s on hold again. 

Nine minutes, and at least the hold times are getting smaller. A confused, different supervisor can’t understand why she was told her payments are being halted and puts her back on hold while they go to find out. 

It feels like it’s been forever. She pulls the phone away from her ear and stretches her neck, tapping it on speaker so that when the nice supervisor comes back, she’ll be able to tell immediately. The sun has well and truly set when she wanders over to the kitchen window, the front yard dark and foreboding, invisible to the yellow cast of light through worn lace curtains that were probably put up three owners ago in the nineties. 

It hasn’t been forever, but it’s coming up on six hours of phone time and she resists the urge to throw the damn thing through the window and into the impenetrable night. 

If her payments do get halted, she won’t be able to buy a new one. The phone clicks up again while she’s struggling to make sense of how it can possibly have been five hours and fifty-five minutes already, it’s just ridiculous, and it’s a different voice that speaks to her. 

“Alison Gibbons?” It’s smooth, and she can’t identify their gender, or even an accent, just that they aren’t the supervisor she’d been speaking to before.

“Yes,” she says tiredly, pressing the bridge of her nose between her fingers until the skin pinches, the sharp pop of her fingernails in skin a deep contrast to the ache that’s been boiling in the back of her head all afternoon and evening. 

“Good. I’ve been examining your transcript, can you please summarise—”

“I just need to confirm my payments for the next fortnight,” she snaps, no longer caring that she’s cutting them off. “I’m sorry, I’ve been explaining this for six godforsaken hours already. I can’t come in person because my selected centre in Woolsborough is having renovations done for the next two months, so I’m confirming my payment requirements have been met over the phone. Yes I’ve uploaded the signed applications to the document cloud on the website, yes a case worker has confirmed they’ve been received in the system, yes my details are current, yes my phone number still ends in 9860, yes my driver’s licence was updated in May, yes I’m still seeking full time work, yes I completed the mandatory training time, please god just text me whatever confirmation link you need from my end or whatever it is so I can get off this phone call.”

There’s a long, poignant silence from the other end of the phone, and for a heart stopping moment she wonders if she’s breached the line of rudeness that would get her call ended for ‘harassing service employees’ or whatever it is—

“I can absolutely do that!” says the voice, sounding strangely delighted. “I’m so sorry it’s taken this long; you’ve really met every criterion.”

She almost sobs with relief, the force of relief hitting her stronger than she could ever have anticipated. “Thank you,” she manages in a strangled voice, and her phone buzzes in her hand with an incoming text with a link in it. 

“Not at all,” they say, with a strange understanding in their tone even through the flat cheerfulness of call centre patter. “It’s really my pleasure to help. I understand it can be very frustrating to have to deal with the internal structures when we can’t tell you how it works, so I try to make sure anyone who ends up on these lines for too long gets what they need.”

“You’re doing god’s work,” she says fervently, turning data back on in her phone settings and tapping the link in the text. The first thing she’s going to do is pay her Wi-Fi. 

They chuckle, almost indulgently. “That’s kind of you to say. Now, this will only confirm the payment for this fortnight.”

She taps through all the confirmation screens and terms and conditions that pop up in the new window. “I know,” she says absently. “I’m going to elect a temporary centre on the website tomorrow, I really don’t have time for these prolonged phone calls right now, so this won’t be happening again.”

“Oh, of course not,” they say brightly. “I don’t think anyone wants to be spending this much time on the phone.”

She laughs, the first honest humour she’s felt all day. “You’d be right about that,” she says, tapping what looks like it might be the last screen. It is, and a big green tick resolves on the web page, letting her know that her plan is signed and confirmed on her end. It’s weird, it looks a little different to the usual website. “I think I’m done.”

“You are, just let me tap on my end,” they say and there’s a scratchy, scribbling noise. 

She’s never had to confirm from a phone appointment, and it’s worked on their end, so it makes sense that the website looks weird, she guesses. All the government ones are cobbled together from eight different services that were never meant to be used at once, anyway. She takes a screenshot of it to send to her group chat in celebration of the end of her trial. 

The webpage dings again with a smiley face at her and it feels like all the tension has left her body. “And you’re all set,” they say cheerfully. “Thank you for your patience, Allison. We’ll see you in two weeks.”

The phone hangs up unceremoniously, and she gives into the urge to throw something by tossing it at her couch and reaching for a bottle of wine she got on special. It isn’t until she wakes up late the next day that her friend’s confusion about the screenshot reaches her, and two weeks later, when the man in the red suit with the unusually large hound knocks on her door, she doesn’t have it in her to be surprised.