We’ve all heard it. It is the ubiquitous mantra piped through our telephone earpieces every time we call a corporate entity – after we have spent 10 minutes listening to repulsive muzak carefully chosen to induce the caller hang up to make the torment stop. Those stalwarts persistent enough to battle through the auditory torture are invited to press an interminable sequence of numbers, an arcane code, permitting them to enter into the hallowed presence of the loathed robotic voice.

At this point it has become clear that your call is not important. If it were, a human would be there to answer it. Or, after leaving a message, a human would call us back. But one doesn’t.

The message is a lie. The person reading it knows it is a lie. The corporation that wrote the script for the person to read knows it is a lie. We know it is a lie. They know we know it is a lie but the message drones on. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it about a regime that our Western world seems bent on emulating:

We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know that we know they are lying.
We know that they know we know they are lying.
And still they continue to lie.

If you are wondering what prompted this: I called my bank branch today under the naive delusion that I might be able to speak to a person. Thus far, in spite of valiant persistence, my best efforts have been thwarted.

I even wrote a Google review to vent my frustration. I received a response from the Digital Care Team thanking me for bringing this to their attention because my feedback is important to them.

The trouble is, they are lying. They are not grateful, and my feedback isn’t important. They know they are lying, and they know that I know they are lying. And still they continue to lie.

I’ve just filled it in. Some things are too hard to resist:

I have two enduring memories of Junior School. The first is of Day One when Mr. Stucky, our teacher, introduced his students to a display case mounted on the wall behind him. It contained an array of canes, each of which had a name which he gleefully recited as he lovingly flexed them, one by one. I don’t remember their names, but I do remember a fervent desire not to come into physical contact with any of them. Happily, I didn’t, nor do I recall anyone else suffering that misfortune; his class was very orderly.

My second memory is of my last year of Junior School under the gentle ministrations of Miss George, a young lady who, my mother informed me, was soon to marry and become Mrs. Something Else. Miss George had no canes. She did have hands, though, and when she thought a student deserved their application, she would slap him repeatedly on the thigh.

I had at an early age adopted an air of studied insouciance towards matters that others told me were of great import but which I found of little interest; hence, I sat at the back of the class and tended not to listen to her. One thing does stick in my mind: after waxing eloquent on the conquering of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary,  she looked at me and said: “Look at Jenkins in the back, there – he is in a constant state of Everest.” I couldn’t argue with the observation.

At one point my curiosity overcame my desire to be left alone in peace. Miss George had a special inkwell. We all had inkwells, but hers, so rumour had it, was immune to spills: no matter how far you tipped it, the ink would not come out. I had to test this. One day, when Miss George was out of the room, I boldly went to her desk and tipped the inkwell upside down: red ink spilled everywhere. When she returned, I experienced for the first time the sensation of being a Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God.

“The person who did it Must Own Up”, she said. “But I don’t want anyone Telling Stories.” We all knew that being a snitch was Bad.

I owned up. She made me clean it up. I spilled more ink trying to clean it, but Miss George was merciful, and I was spared The Hand.

Things are different now. We are all encouraged to tell stories and no one particularly cares whether they bear any relation to what is true: all that matters is that is that we experience them as true. Objective reality is irrelevant.

I think I prefer Miss George’s version of Telling Stories, Hand and all.

I received this phone call today:

I’ve been waiting all year for one of these, so naturally I returned the call:

I wasn’t entirely happy with that, so I had another go:

That got me nowhere. One more try, I thought. The language in this one is a little more fruity: