I was on the phone with a subscription service that I wanted to cancel before the end of my free period of usage. The good fellow on the other end of the conversation was clearly supposed to encourage me not to cancel, in fact to offer me enticing upgrades and extensions.

I imagined him being in the Philippines or perhaps India, though he could have been Kansas City. I don’t normally raise my voice with hard working sales people. As the fourth iteration of saying “No, I just want to cancel the subscription,” approached, I upped the ante to say, “Look, this is the fourth time I am telling you, I only want to cancel. Please just cancel the service. That is all.”

I imagined him imagining his surpervisor, the one in the glass tower looking over the room full of workers wearing headsets, finally relenting and giving him silent permission to grant my leave.

After the call terminated, I put my phone down on the desk, and muttered something like “oh my god, what a pain!”. A moment passed. And then another moment. Suddenly I heard a distant voice calling me.

“Mr. Sullivan?” the small voice called. “Mr. Sullivan, you didn’t hang up the phone.”