YOU (quickly): No! No! Really! I just heard of him, that’s all. From a friend.

PHONE PERSON: Well, in that case, please hold.

eighteen-minute pause

PHONE PERSON: Dr. Bunderson wants to know what you mean by “strange-shaped.”

YOU: Well, kind of like M & M’s.

PHONE PERSON: Please hold.

twenty-three-minute pause

PHONE PERSON: Plain or peanut?

YOU: Plain. Shall I hold?

PHONE PERSON: Of course.

Forty-nine-minute pause

PHONE PERSON: Dr. Bunderson wants you to bring Thad in and sit in the waiting room for two hours reading books with names like Billy the Bunny Bumps His Nose and listening to children shriek behind closed doors, after which Dr. Bunderson will see you for slightly under a minute and a half and prescribe a medicine that you have to administer anally when your child is sleeping and that costs as much per ounce as a round-trip Concorde ticket to Paris, France.

YOU (gratefully): Thank you.

Important as it is to find a Pediatric Group, it is not the most important task, because it is merely a matter of life and death which means it pales by comparison with the task of ...

Finding Somebody To Fix Your Car

This has become very difficult in recent years, because most gas stations have switched over to being “convenience” stores, meaning that, in addition to gas, they sell food such as bologna sandwiches created right around the time of the Big Bang. But they do not fix cars. You pull into a modern gas station with an actual car problem, and odds are that the cashier, sitting behind the bulletproof glass watching MTV, will have the police come and arrest you for blocking the access of legitimate customers wishing to purchase Slimjims, cheap sunglasses, and TicTac breath mints.

The reason gas stations sell food, of course, is that the supermarkets are busy cashing checks. The supermarkets have to cash checks because the banks are busy mailing unsolicited credit cards to everybody in the Western Hemisphere. The result is that very few people fix cars.