I have a humor piece in the current issue of Funny Times:
A NATIVE OF THE SUN STAFF
By J.C. Duffy
The other day I got a text message on my phone:
“Transcript (low confidence)
Good afternoon, it’s a
native of the sun staff. I
just wanna let you know
your groceries are here
whenever you get a
chance to pick them up.
Thank you.”
Imagine how excited I was when I thought I’d gotten a message from a native of the sun staff. I mean, the staffers on the sun must be busy. And hot. So, to take the time to leave me a voicemail, it must be pretty important, I thought.
Then I read the rest of it: they wanted to let me know my groceries were here. Wow. How would a staffer on the sun know that, and why would they care, with everything they have to worry about up there? And why were they calling themselves “natives”? That’s weird. Then I noticed the words, “Transcript (low confidence),” so I listened to the actual voicemail.
It wasn’t “a native of the sun staff.” It was actually “Anita at the front desk.” That made a lot more sense.
How disappointing. The nicest thing I can say about the robots at the phone company is that their low confidence in their transcript was well-placed.
I went down to the lobby and thanked Anita for being a real person. She gave me the fisheye. It wasn’t the first time. As I turned away I noticed that the name tag on her sweater had a tiny image of the sun next to the word “STAFF.” Was there more to this than a mere garbled voicemail transcript? Was Anita a double agent, a spy working for both my building and the sun? I grabbed my groceries and got the hell onto the elevator in a cold sweat.
This will make a great scary story to tell the next time I’m sitting around a campfire roasting marshmallows with a bunch of idiots
****
This story was based on an actual transcript and an actual voicemail I got on my phone. And then I took it from there. One of the things I invented was the "image of the sun" on Anita's name tag. At least I thought I invented it. Then I noticed just such an image in one of the photos in my previous blog post:
