People calling UGGA to solve their investment account problems were directed to a special help line. These calls ran the gamut of lost checks, mistakes on purchase or redemption orders, changes in account registrations, beneficiary declarations, lost statements, lost tax reports, questions about portfolio holdings, proxy voting instructions, timing of the next distribution of income and capital gains, and shareholder meeting dates. These calls were mostly from people who were too lazy to read instructions sent to them, too sloppy to keep track of paperwork already sent to them, and too screwed up to remember who their family members were. David devised a system to handle all these requests with maximum efficiency, thereby saving fifty thousand man hours of duplicitous UGGA staff work each year.
Through black market purchases, David obtained bootlegged software that replicated the automated telephone answering systems of the Wyoming Department of Wildlife, the Internal Revenue Service, a major oil and gas company, a major mutual fund organization that operated forty different mutual funds, and the Environmental Advocacy Agency. He had a software engineer splice these phone systems into the UGGA phone system. In Man Child’s office, an electronic status board was installed. It looked like five inverted Christmas trees with descending rows of lights which tracked the progression of up to five simultaneous callers.
When a shareholder called for shareholder services, the receptionist determined from her checklist of call inquiries if it was a call that David classified as a time-waster. The receptionist immediately transferred those calls to Old Gravel Throat. He listened courteously to the caller and then assured them that UGGA had a department specifically set up to deal with that particular problem. It didn’t matter what the problem was; each shareholder received the same courteous understanding voice of Old Gravel Throat. Then he would say, “Madam, let me transfer you to the right people right away.”
The call was transferred into the UGGA telephone answering system. In Man Child’s office, the top left light on one of the inverted Christmas trees lit up, letting him know there was a caller in the phone system. The caller heard a voice telling her it would take fifteen to thirty minutes for the next available representative because of heavy call volumes. She could leave her number and someone would call her back—but no one ever called those people back—or she could wait.
After thirty minutes, another voice came on and said, “Your call is now being redirected. Please continue to hold.” Then a voice would come on and say, “You have reached the Wyoming Department of Wildlife. Push pound for Spanish. To report a poaching, press one. To apply for an elk license, press two. A moose license, press three. A bighorn sheep license, press four. A bear license, press five. For small game and bird licenses, press seven-seven. Please stay on the line for the next available agent. In the Tetons, the temperature is three degrees above zero in Jackson and twenty below on the mountaintops. Winds are gusting between thirty and fifty miles per hour. In the Powder River Basin, it’s twelve above zero. Please continue to hold.
“If you want to hear elevator music while you wait, press one. If you want to hear the sounds of a moose in rut, press two. If you want to hear a cougar killing a deer, press three. For shotguns blasting geese out of the sky, press four. For coyotes tearing a rabbit apart, press five. For wolves howling at the moon, press six. If you think you have reached this recording in error, press the pound key.”
The caller would press the pound key and get sent to the next telephone answering system, which was the one for the IRS. The recording would say, “All of our agents are busy serving other customers. Your wait time will be seventy-five minutes. Please stay on the line so you do not lose your place. Your wait time is now seventy-four minutes. Did you hear about our new tip-off program? You can get ten percent of the money we beat out of your friends if you turn them in to us for auditing. If you want to help crack down on these despicable tax cheats, press two. If you want to ask one of our agents about our witness protection program, press three. Only use this option if you are turning in drug dealers who steal more than one million dollars; otherwise, press four and continue holding. If you are calling about a tax refund, we will switch your call to our super service call center in the lovely country of Myanmar, where we have people who can’t speak English standing by to help you. You’ll need to have handy your Myanmar-to-English dictionary to assist with our prompt service. If you think you’ve reached this number in error, press the star key on your touch pad or scream an obscenity into your phone. Our agents will understand that. If you are using an obsolete phone, hang up and start over.”
For those intrepid souls who made it to the next level a voice answered with “Congratulations, you have reached Bigger Than Ever Oil Company, or BTEOC. If you are calling to report an offshore oil spill, press one. An onshore oil spill, press two. If you are calling because some caribou got his antlers stuck in one of our drill platforms, press three. If a platform blew up and is spewing valuable crude into the ocean, press four. If you are calling to get permission to dynamite the ocean floor with a seismic shot, press five. If you are trying to report refinery explosions, press six. If you are an environmentalist or a representative of some environmental group, please press the pound key followed by the letters SAND, as in pound sand. If you are a First Nations representative and you want a better deal from us, we’ll connect you to our used mobile home rental subsidiary. We’ll also give you a ten percent off coupon for your next tank of gas. If you believe you reached this recording in error, press all the keys on your keypad simultaneously.”
Those callers were sent to the major mutual fund company’s phone software. The voice answered and said, “Hello, please tell us your social security number for verification purposes. Also give us your two credit card numbers with the biggest available credit lines so we can doubly check who you are. We can’t be too careful. You know how it is! Thank you for that information. If you are calling about our Big Growth Fund, press one.” If the caller pressed one, the voice came on again and said, “I’m sorry. We don’t have a fund like that with you as a shareholder. Perhaps you want our bond fund? If so, press two.” If the caller pressed two, the voice came back on and said, “I’m sorry. You must be calling the wrong place. We don’t even have a bond fund.” Then the voice gave the caller a raspberry over the phone and said, “If you believe you made this call in error, press six-nine followed by the pound key.”
After being directed to the environmental software, a voice came on and said, ‘Thank you for calling Bunny Huggers Screw Big Oil, or BHSBO. If you’re part of our special study group that enters data on how many times a day a fruit fly fucks, please press one. If you’re part of our hundred-billion-dollar study about how to relocate six minnow fish in Little Dipshit Creek, press two. If you’re part of the polar exploration group that went to the North Pole to study global warming but got stuck in the ice a thousand miles south of the pole, press three. If you’re from a university that’s on our kickback program for falsified scientific studies, press four. If you are involved in our new Kill the Eagles Program and would like to volunteer to run around on the ground dressed like a chicken, we can relocate you and your family to one of our wind farms. If that interests you, press five. If you believe you’ve reached this number in error, please stay on the line and our next available agent will pick up in about fifteen minutes.”
While the callers migrate their way through the phone maze, the lights on Man Child’s inverted Christmas trees keep blinking. Only the most determined callers get through to the last light at the bottom of a given tree, and that caller got to speak to Man Child. After the light was steadily on for fifteen minutes, he turned away from watching gay porn and picked up the phone.
He answered with “Hello. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, I’m Sergeant Doofus Botchitup. I’m ready to take down your homicide or kidnapping report. I must tell you that you are being recorded and by making this call you are automatically our prime suspect in this case. Now ple
ase give me your name, address, phone number, the name of the person murdered or kidnapped, and your whereabouts minute by minute for the last forty-eight hours. Be exact, madam. This information will go into your permanent criminal record file. Our crime lab will be in touch with you shortly. An officer will come to your home and pick you up, take you to the downtown station where you’ll be fingerprinted, your blood will be drawn for DNA matching, your eyeballs will be retina scanned while fully dilated and you’ll have a mug shot with front and side profile. Your eyes will get back to normal after about three hours.”
At that point even those few who made it to the final light on the inverted tree hung up. A lot of paperwork was avoided using David’s shareholder services telephone answering system.
FINS
There are those amongst humankind who possess what a psychologist would term a high emotional IQ. Their sensory faculties are fine-tuned to detect the slightest variances in a voice tone or facial expression when a narrative is proffered. They are razor-honed to note and retain the telltale giveaway that others signal when change interrupts their ordered world, like the spider they are, sitting in the center of their handiwork, called to action by the touch of the fly upon their sensory web. The slightest tilt of the eyebrow, dart-away of the eye, twitch or purse of the lips, or the expected reaction to a comment that was too long delayed to credibly be the honest reaction—these were but a few of the things David noticed about people. He’d knowingly honed his signal-gathering radars since childhood. A child often naturally did that to get the best of his parents, especially if the child knew his parents did not love him and wished he’d never been born.
After office hours over drinks one day, David asked Bob how things were for him in his after-hours life. Bob gave the predicted “all fine” response, except David wasn’t buying it, as Bob gave a very slight, fleeting grimace prior to speaking. David knew it was time to make his move. Much like a spider is quick to follow its feeling vibrations to its prey in order to wrap a strand of silk over it and bind it to the web, David cast out a line to Bob, a chance to spend some time outside the four walls of his apartment and take a break from pounding the pavement.
“How would you like to get out for some fishing?”
Bob did fly fishing when he could and he presumed David wanted to walk riverbanks with him. “Sounds like fun. What day do you want to go?”
“Actually, I was thinking we could go for four or five days, really catch some great fish. I thought we’d go for salmon out of Astoria, Oregon. Would you be up for that?”
Bob was all for it and a week later, he and David were checked out of the office. Astoria, on the mouth of the Columbia, was renowned for its blackberries, raspberries, ice cream and bakery shops, and lovely harbor. Bears and cats liked the town as well. It was the logical choice for a salmon fishing outing.
David pointed out the monument column to John Jacob Astor, telling Bob everybody had the thing wrongly categorized. The column had a wraparound mural that detailed the history of the Astor family, but David remarked it was an excuse to build a big shaft to honor the first Astor because the guy was probably a big prick. Anyway, regardless of the reason they built the thing, the guy got a lot of Indians killed and had also killed lots of animals for their furs. That completed David’s history lesson of Astoria.
Salmon fishing wasn’t really fishing. There was no thought put into it whatsoever. There were no flies to tie, no hatch to work, no presentation skills were needed, and no line handling expertise was required, but it was challenging. In the summertime, the little salmon boats took in their lines from their piers at four in the morning and got underway.
In the great Pacific Northwest, four in the morning was not an ungodly hour like it was in latitudes farther south. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the people and the daylight were sort of sleepily up. It was a misty, fishy-smelling time of morning. Occasional harbor noises of gulls squawking, seamen opening and closing deck hatches, and emptying buckets of herring into boat bait wells separated sleep time from fish time. It was that yawn widely time, that eerie haunting time where boats bobbed to the slow harbor wave action and some dame in an artist’s beret sat on a stool with her easel and paints. Cats yawned, stretched, watched the scene and licked their chops in anticipation of fish gut piles and unused bait that would be thrown their way when the boats returned.
David and Bob went to their chartered boat, met its captain, got their raingear for the predictable Pacific morning rain showers, and took their seats. The skipper gave them their nautical briefing, which was basically to hold on tight after he moved the vessel out of the harbor and downriver, or head below so they didn’t bounce off. He told the landlubbers he’d take the boat over the bar. In years past, many ships failed to navigate the ocean breakers that met the mouth of this mightiest of all Northwest rivers. It was where ships breached into the swells and succumbed to the wave action, which broke up their keels, battered their gunnels, and sank many of them. Men died. It was where the ocean collided with the river. It was the bar.
His mighty twin diesel engine six hundred horse-powered craft was unlikely to meet such a dastardly fate, the skipper assured them. They would use max power and slam head-on into the swells and the waves, thus avoiding the fates of hundreds of lesser crafts. The only drawback to the skipper’s method of clearing the bar was that all on board would feel like they were riding a rodeo bull while inhaling copious fumes of diesel exhaust, so of course his passengers should expect to barf their guts out. The skipper’s briefing was followed by a hearty “Har har” and an offer of some warmed-up coffee left over from the previous day’s outing, or whiskey, the staple of every man of the sea. David and Bob declined the coffee and whiskey, already skittish enough about the bar crossing and not wanting to put more stress on their stomachs. Bob soon wondered why he’d volunteered for this torture. After leaving the harbor, the skipper took the brave little vessel into the Columbia and raced for the bar. In short order, they were at the place where the mouth of the Columbia met the North Pacific. Columbia’s mighty flow meets Pacific’s swells, producing a relentless wave chop. The force of all King Neptune’s fury lifted up and plunged downward the puny shipyard creations of mortal men. The landlubbers clung to their little chartered craft as it alternatively pointed vertically skyward and then headlong downward into the roiling gray watery Hades. As if the pitching and the roll of the mad ride weren’t enough, for nausea-inducing measure the skipper slammed his throttles full ahead to squeeze enough power from the twin diesels to punch his craft headlong into the onrushing swells. Onward, ever onward they went, into their cascading water ranks of death and hell. The engines screamed and belched suffocating billows of nauseous fumes. The ride, the fumes, and the churning caused both David and Bob to barf over the side while holding onto the rail. After what felt like an eternity in hell, the boat finally reached the open ocean. They’d found the perfect spot to catch salmon, according to the skipper.
There was a fourth man on the boat. His job was to rig the poles, bait the fish hooks with herring smelts, and gaff the hooked fish. David joked to this hapless deckhand when they boarded after the skipper introduced him. “So you’re the guy who baits the hooks, huh? I guess that would make you the boat’s Chief Masturbator!” He let out a snickering laugh. The young man was embarrassed, and no one else laughed.
Fishing for salmon meant sitting around drinking beer out of a can while the bait man rigged the hooks and threw the lines in the ocean. Fishing poles were placed in socket holders and the boat chugged along at about one or two knots. Pole lines grew taut and rod tips dipped when the fish were ‘on.’ The customer then picked up the bending pole and reeled in the hapless salmon that had swallowed the hook and doomed itself before it could swim upstream to spawn. Once alongside, the deckhand gaffed or netted the hapless fish and swung it aboard in a well-timed motion. The line and hook were ripped or cut away from the salmon’s gullet and its traumatized corpse. With still-breathing gills and
flapping tail it was thrown into the fish tank. Once the daily limit of fish was caught, the boat headed back to the harbor. Paying guests suffered a second mind-numbing buckaroo ride as the craft traversed the bar retuning. With breakfasts long gone, nothing but greenish-brown beer slime remained to barf up on the return trip.
Walking off the pier toward the quay wall, wobbly sea legs halting their locomotion, David put his hand on Bob’s back. “How’d you like the fishing trip?”
Bob thought David’s hand was intended as a gesture of pride and solidarity in accomplishment when they’d accomplished nothing except paying to get sick and kill four helpless fish. The fishing was nothing like the challenge of stream fishing. Bob reflected that David probably had no idea what it was like to actually go fishing for the sport of it. He noticed that David purposely let his hand linger longer than necessary for natural camaraderie.
Two more fishing trips followed, one for sturgeon and one for bass. For the big bottom-feeding sturgeons, the duo again went to Astoria on a different week and chartered a boat. That time they went on a smooth trip upriver and dropped anchor. It was a hot sunny day. Their skipper suggested they strip to their bathing suits while he rigged the poles and baited the hooks. Bob went below and changed into his baggy trunks and a tee shirt. When he came up on deck, he saw David sprawled out on a deck chair wearing only a Speedo. Bob avoided looking at David’s body. Marty had it right when she told him that she thought it must be gross. A huge flabby gut spilled over his lower abdomen, the fat ooze stopping just above the strap pouch which appeared to hold two tiny walnuts. They were distinctly visible against the skintight fabric. Bob sat in the adjacent deck chair while David babbled about how he loved the outdoors and fresh air. They caught three sturgeons each and canned them at the local cannery like they did the salmon.
When The Butterflies Come Page 29