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How to Get High Blood Pressure in One Easy Lesson, by Bruce Levine

24/4/2020

 
Felicity Campbell strove for perfection in everything she did, but while she was striving for that perfection she also managed to have an air of nonchalance. How she accomplished that delicate balance was known only to Felicity, but it certainly served her well.

Today, however, was a true test of her ability to maintain her precarious balancing act. Today she got angry, with a capital angry.

She’d used the same insurance company for many years and always had had a very good working relationship with them in that there never seemed to be a situation which hadn’t been easily resolved with a simple phone call. Today, however, she was on the phone, once again waiting to be connected to another person – in this case the department supervisor, to make what she hoped was a formal complaint about the incompetence of completing the simple task of removing a component from her policy.

First she had spent several minutes wading through the myriad array of phone prompts. Finally she’d been placed in a queue to wait to speak with a customer representative. Finally she actually spoke with a human being, went through the entire saga of trying to get the component removed, including the original date of the request, nearly a month prior, and a response that it would be completed within three to five business days – that, as stated, was nearly a month ago.

Ten days before she had made a similar call and, after going through the entire process was told that it would be resolved that day. That was ten days ago and nothing had been completed.

Now she was on the phone with a supervisor, had gone through the entire story once again because the supervisor had not been briefed by the underling, and was again on hold while the supervisor attempted to track down her emails and the company’s responses.

As she waited on hold she attempted to regain her usual sense of composure, but these situations not only exasperated her, but caused her to wonder, once again, about the incompetence of the world today, and about the future of the world.

An hour and eleven minutes into the current phone call and, after threatening to change insurance company, she received a confirmation email and a commitment for the refund plus an additional amount to cover the interest charges on her credit card account for the delay.

Felicity did not feel any better, but felt somewhat vindicated.

Her next step, in her quest for perfection, was to seek a new insurance company and transfer her policies.

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    Friday Flash Fiction is primarily a site for stories of 100 words or fewer, and our authors are expected to take on that challenge if they possibly can. Most stories of under 150 words can be trimmed and we do not accept submissions of 101-150 words.


    However, in response to demand, the FFF team constructed this forum for significantly longer stories of 151-500 words. Please send submissions for these using the Submissions Page.

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    One little further note. Posting and publishing 500-word stories takes a little time if they need to be formatted, too.
    ​Please note that we tend to post longer flash fiction exactly as we find it – wrong spacing, everything.

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