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This is Ms. Lucinda. She man’s, woman’s, answers our 900 hotline here at the Institute, where she handles the complaints, suggestions, comments, solicitations, threats, follow ups to our Nigerian investments, pizza orders and is our all around girl Friday.

She occasionally becomes upset and loses her composure when handling some of the calls we get since the addition of our new phone service. We pay attention to this as Ms. Lucinda has a rather shadowy background, we don’t know much about her except she did some time in the Merchant Marines and may have been involved with training some of the troops that were used in those failed attempts to oust Fidel in the late 60’s. Be that as it may she has a rather spectacular vocabulary. In fact after listening to her for a while, even with a fair knowledge of human anatomy, you can not believe that people could actually do those things to each other or themselves. Also she carries a knife so we tend to give her plenty of space until she calms down.

The problem is this, when we were shopping around for a phone system to handle the incredible volume of calls we get daily we needed to have an 800 number so our readers wouldn’t have to spend their hard-earned money in contacting us. I’m afraid I must accept some of the blame for this myself, as I went for the lowest bid and worked with “Phones Ahoy” an off-shore media and communications company and was swayed by the glib salesmanship of one of their sales people.

My main objective was to get a reliable 800 number but they were incredibly expensive to operate and as we were between grants at the time, budget constraints led me to choose option B which was a 900 number. Nobody told me what a 900 number was and why 100 silly numbers between 800 and 900 would make such a big difference. The salesperson said it would increase our phone traffic and expand our personal contacts which is what we constantly try to do here at the Institute, to increase our visibility and allow us to raise more funds to do our  good work.

Also it would probably have been wiser to inform Ms. Lucinda about the change in our phone system. It turns out that not all of our incoming calls are from our readers, in fact I don’t know if some of the people that call in can read.  And who are these people they keep asking for. Glinny the wonder tongue, Helga, Mrs. Whipsong, Maurice, we don’t have anyone by those names working here, and we certainly don’t sell home health care products, whether they’re UL approved or not.

I can certainly understand why Ms. Lucinda gets upset, but in going over our phone statements I’ve noticed that we have been generating a certain additional income from this 900 number thing. It seems that we get money when these strange callers call in so we have instructed Ms. Lucinda to see if she can assist any of these callers further, as it turns out you make more money the longer you keep them on the phone. Hmmmm. So far Ms. Lucinda has been cooperative but I think she may be reaching the end of her tether so to speak, so I’ve instructed her to begin training one of the new interns in our new advanced telephone technique, just as a backup.

We have always been quick to adopt new technology here at the Institute so if this 900 number thing will help our bottom line then we’re going for it. Anything that will advance our ability to help our fellow human beings and make us some fast dough is a welcome addition to our program. Now if we can just keep Ms. Lucinda together until we get that second line in we’ll be golden.