Mrs. Kurtz, On Hold, part the fifth.

After eighteen minutes, she was no longer amused.

“Uh, what freaky messages?” The service engineer sounded sincere.

“The messages I had to hear for eighteen minutes by my clock. Can you un-der-stand that? I wasted eighteen minutes of my fucking time waiting for your ass to pick up the phone. What do you think I do? Watch TV all day? Eighteen minutes I listened to that crap about the aliens–”

“Aliens? What aliens?”

“At first it was just the janitors, you know. And now it’s practically everybody. Eighteen minutes of this crap. Do you understand? Or are you an alien, too? Jim T. Biggins is a fucking nut, whoever he is–”

“I’m sorry, lady. I heard he lost it, but I didn’t know–”

“What? What’s going on with this company. I’m almost ready to drop it and switch to–”

“It’s all taken care of. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Mr. Biggins has been fired for racism. Nobody knew he’d changed the message. I guess he–”

“Racism? Fuck this. My husband is black and I have two beautiful children. I’m not giving our hard-earned cash to some bunch of cocksucking racist pigs.”

“You’re not, m’am. That’s why he got fired.”

“What about the aliens?”

“What about ’em? We’re really controlled by the Japanese.”

“Fucking Japs,” she said.