“Hello.” Open line sounds, but no voice; “Hello.” Now I recognize it, it’s the pause before the human comes on once the dialing app has reported that I’ve stopped eating dinner to answer the phone. I start to hang up.
“Theresa?” A voice I don’t recognize pronounces my name, even gets the “h” right. A lot of people have trouble with tat; I mean, that.
“Who is this?”
“Your cereal company.”
“I don’t have a cereal company.”
“Don’t say that. We’re a family.”
“I don’t have a family.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young lady.”
“Sorry. All I meant was I don’t like the usage, ‘your cereal company,’ nothing about not liking you. I suppose this is about the Oleogramcruncharoos.”
“The cereal that has absolutely no butter fat and yet it tastes so buttery.” Pause, “Say it.”
“No.”
“But that’s our trademark name, Oleogramcruncharoos, the cereal that has absolutely no butter fat and yet it tastes so buttery.”
“Who is this really? Mom?”
“You’ve stopped buying Oleogramcruncharoos.”
“You mean the cereal that has absolutely no butter fat and yet it tastes so buttery?”
“That’s the one.”
“Found a bug in it.”
“And you didn’t call our 800 number? We have a swat team, ho ho. Someone would have come to your house with a new box and searched it for you right there, on videotape, to show that there weren’t any bugs in it. Oh yes, and we could have killed the one you found.”
“It was already dead.”
“I trust you can produce a body.”
“No.”
“What were you thinking of? Without some kind of forensic evidence, we can’t close the file. We can’t be sure why we’ve lost you as a customer.”
“I never said I wasn’t your customer anymore. I just haven’t bought any cereal for a while. In fact, my therapist says it’s very important to buy your bugbait again.”
“This call is being recorded for your protection, so you better say Oleogramcruncharoos, the cereal that has absolutely no butter fat but tastes so buttery.”
“And bugs love it.”
“I’ll let that pass this once. You said you were supposed to buy it again. Why haven’t you?”
“The bug was, well…”
“So big and nasty?”
“No, so small I almost didn’t see it.”
“Are you sure that there was even a bug there?”
“What?”
“I think maybe little Miss Smartass Needs a Therapist Doesn’t Get Along with Her Mommy, is trying to put one over on her old cereal company.”
“I want to speak to your supervisor.”
“I am the supervisor, moron, the Big Supervisor, the one who doesn’t get any supervision at all. I am the supervisor of all the snivelling, crushed telephone assistance personnel you’ve hung up on over the last three weeks. I get the hard cases, the ‘Ooh I found a little tiny bug and I can’t cope anymore with your product that feeds the country and saves it from its own self-destructive eating habits and still has a sense of humor about itself and is prepared to forgive if only you’ll come clean; you’re not ruining my record, I should worry, 445 complaints and not one of them made it into my record, at least not permanently. That boy of mine can’t read much but he sure can surf and turf the web. We call him Spider Monkey because we don’t really like him very much. And suppose you were to get me fired, he could get me reinstated. Too bad he keeps stealing from my IRA; but then software isn’t cheap, at least I don’t think it is.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll just stop talking. Let’s say I just hate health foods.”
“Just needed to have you say it on tape. Now get back to that big juicy steak before the sour cream on the baked potato gets too warm.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m not really your cereal company.”
“I don’t have a cereal company.”
“I’ll leave that to your therapist, Missy. I’m the Mom&Pop Data Collection Company.”
“Who’s that?”
Us. We got into data management years ago after Spider Monkey set us up a program on his Sinclair ZX-2000, which predicted when we should let out the dogs into the store to discourage shoplifters. We’re the People’s Choice now, although I must admit some of them would be surprised to hear that the masses of information on their buying habits are going into our database. Wherever Internet shopping accounts are being hacked into, Mom&Pop and Spider Monkey will be there. Wherever the grocery store scanners routinely misread bar codes so that people pay 45% more than the display price for staples, we’ll be there. Whenever someone starts spending a little too much time at the hot pretzel kiosk in the underground city, well, you see what I’m saying.”
“But what’s the point?”
“Nothing less than a computer model which predicts all human behavior, down to whether it will be Mounds or Almond Joy. Once Spider Monkey comes down off his caffeine high, we’re going to rule the world. We’ve had our model for predicting all human behavior ready for years, but Spidey says we need a hard drive as big as Jupiter.”
“What government is going to fund a project to set up someone else as King of the World and Emperor of All Inner Planets?”
“They helped a lot at first, until we started asking for the planets. Maybe there is something to be said for a humanities education.”
“You mean, if you had been exposed to the great books, you wouldn’t have known what brand of sour cream I bought yesterday?”
“Oh no. We must know, just in case.”
“In case of a bug in it?”
“Was it in the 500 millilitre So Sweet You Won’t Believe It’s Sour Sour Cream bought at 11:46 a.m. Wednesday at the Don’t Be Hasty Mart? This is your dairy products company.”
Theresa Moritz is a Toronto writer who has not yet published a book or chapbook. Her stories and poems have appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Prairie Journal, Prism international, Capilano Review, Iowa Review, and other magazines.
