Cancer Diary III: Even More Calls, But Nobody's Answering

There are endless small indignities to having to utilize American health care to attend to a major health issue in 2026, but I'm currently on hold (20 minutes and counting) with my hospital's finance department for unknown reasons and I'm about to lose my shit.

For one: I owe no current money, having made a painfully large payment yesterday so I have no idea what this call could possibly be about, but they keep auto-calling me so I decided to pick this one up.

For two: they auto-call, and waste your time by first stating "call us back immediately at this number referencing blah blah blah" before offering up the SHOULD BE MENTIONED FIRST YOU STUPID FUCKS option to just Press 1 to talk now. I want to get this over with and find out what the fuck they're still calling me about, so I Press 1.

For three: that just puts me on hold for, let's see, 22m 11s so far. Why would their fuckass automated system maybe not offer a Press 1 to Talk Now when they clearly have no agents available? And I'm also in sunk-cost fallacy mode where I don't want to hang up after waiting this long, but god forbid their system give any evidence of a wait time or ANYTHING other than...

For four: the hold music is one short loop of the worst fucking staticky copyright-free nouveau folk music that I've now heard in its entirety SEVENTEEN FUCKING TIMES.

For five: I finally hung up at the half hour point and called back in, this time choosing the auto-menu option to pay any open invoices. They give me a # that I allegedly owe. I check the online portal and that amount is the bill I paid yesterday.

So one half of their automated system isn't talking to the other half, and thinks I still owe money I clearly already paid. I'm sure this is going to be easy-peasy to sort out.

I again enter the "let me talk to human" option and am told there are 11 people in line ahead of me.

Fuck this. Hopefully their systems sync up by tomorrow and they stop calling me, but Lord knows I ain't going to get this forty minutes of my life back, ever. What a fucking joke of a system.