
My girl's number is one digit away from that of a local Urgent Care. When they dial us by mistake and she answers, the question she always gets is "Is this Urgent Care?"
She just says "No, you have the wrong number," and hangs up. When they get me, though, they get one of life's cruel lessons, which is that even the smallest, most inadvertent error seldom goes unpunished. I, like Danny DeVito, love wrong numbers. So when you call me, and I say "Hello," and then you ask "Is this Urgent Care?" you are liable to hear me reply cheerfully with one of the phrases below:
"Yes, but I picked up the phone by mistake. I was reaching for a bone saw."
"No, we're an abortion clinic now. We're just in the process of re-branding."
"Yes, but everybody who works here just won Powerball on a group ticket. Go bleed on someone else's old magazines and cheap plastic furniture."
"Yes, but the doctors asked me to answer the phone because they're all tripping on shrooms."
"Yes it is! Ask about our Happy Hour Specials!"
"Yes, but we close on all Nicaraguan national holidays because that's where we get our doctors from. I should have said Hola!"
"Yes, but I don't work here...everybody who does suddenly threw on haz-mat suits and left the building."
"Yes, but if you're another one of those people who woke up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidneys missing, our lawyer said to assure you our medical record-keeping is completely secure. 100%. Those people didn't get your address and blood type from us. Honest."
"Stitches? You don't need no stinking stitches."
"Yes, but I get tired of talking to sick people all day. Do you want to have phone sex?"
This column is in lieu of two others I started to write, one inspired by Trump again, on whether it is Presidential to assess women's looks on a numeric scale, and the other on the question of how much weight Jared Fogle will gain in prison, unless somebody smuggles in Subway sandwiches to him. And if they smuggled them in baked inside of a cake, that would be pointless.
Subject matter for this post suggested by Nancy Federman, PhD