Freitag, 11. November 2016

Laughing on Wednesday

Wednesday morning, my husband and I made plans to meet for lunch before he left for the office. He'd been working on the sofa since 4am, but it was time to go to the newspaper and attempt to make sense of the American election for his Swiss readers. The idea was, that it we had an anchor in the middle of the day, it could be an oasis. It meant that he wouldn't sit glued to his computer and experience the distancing power that writing the news apparently gives to reporters, if they can be believed. It meant that I wouldn't sit on the sofa with my sore throat, stuffy nose and headache, crying over the news all alone.
After a couple of hours of mouldering in the internet, I got dressed up and put myself together as much as possible and set out to walk, to brave the fresh air, clear my head and clear my head a bit. I ran a couple of hours, used a bunch of tissues, and as I was heading to my husband's office early with a book - for the companionship - I got a phone call.
(I'm crap at answering the phone, especially when I'm feeling fragile, but I've learned that it's the adult thing to do, so I did it.)
The oblivious fella on the call said that he saw that I regularly attended a fitness center. (Effing Base Fit...selling my information...) As someone who is clearly interested in my health, he thought that I would be an excellent customer for his health insurance company. Oh how I laughed. It was so refreshing. Oh, how I needed to laugh and how that man delivered it to me on a silver platter.
"Pardon me, but your information about me is woefully full of holes. I work out regularly, I have an artificial intestinal exit, I've had Crohn's disease for 20 years and took injections that cost 4,000 CHF per month for 4 years very recently. You don't want me as a customer. Let me be someone else's problem."
He thanked me very genuinely for my honesty and wished me a good day. It couldn't be that. It wasn't a good day and hasn't been a good week. But for a 4 minute phone conversation I had a laugh at a man who had rightly mistaken me for a healthy person. 

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