“Hello?”

“My man.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Nothing. You know what I hate?”

“Tell me.”

“Asking other people’s fucking questions.”

“I don’t follow. Is this something you do a lot?”

“Not a lot, but when I do it drives me crazy.”

“Alright, back up. I’m not following you. Why do you ever have to do this?”

“For work. So, like, I am basically a sales guy for the bank. However, the product we sell, or lease actually, is money. To do that, I find clients who need money and then we evaluate their worthiness of receiving our money. Not much different from when you get a mortgage and they look at your tax returns and order an appraisal. That’s kind of what we do on a business.”

“OK, I follow.”

“So, what happens is we collect all this information and then people other than me look at it and make an assessment. Typically, we’ll have some questions for the client. We’ll arrange a call to ask these questions and fill in any gaps we have.”

“Yep, OK. So, what’s your point?”

“Point is, I run the call and I’m the one asking the questions. However, none of them are my questions. The questions are all from the bean counters who are allowed to ask as much as they want. Inevitably, I’m asking questions I don’t quite understand on behalf of someone who gets to remain nameless and faceless.”

“And that’s an issue?”

“It can be because when the customer fires back or points out why a question doesn’t make sense, it’s fucking crickets on my end.”

“I see. So, that person doesn’t speak up?”

“Never. They leave me out to fucking dry. So, I end up backpedaling trying to make sense of someone else’s question because they won’t speak up.”

“Do you call them out afterward?”

“I try. It’s a corporate environment so you can’t ask someone what their fucking problem was. Instead, you basically have to encourage them to speak up, which they brush off and never end up doing.”

“That’s awful.”

“Awful. And, that’s not the only place it happens. Tell me this, does your wife sometimes get you to ask a waiter an awkward question? You know, like she gets you to ask the waiter to take an entree back.”

“Yes. I know exactly what you mean. This weekend I had an awful one. We went to the game with another couple. It’s a good game, everyone is standing up cheering. The lady behind me asks me to ask the guy in front of me to sit down.”

“What?”

“Yeah, and she had her husband with her. So, they got me to do their bidding and be the asshole who asks someone at a football game to sit down?”

“Did you do it?”

“Yes, but as I asked, I pointed her out and explained it was her request.”

“And?”

“She looked at me like I’d sold her out.”

“How did you not throw a drink on her?”

“I thought long and hard about it. Maybe you should try throwing a drink at your bean counters.”

“I’ll consider that next time.”