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Ladder | Nov 08 2001

I was beingWittgenstein charged for collect calls I had not made, so I called the phone company to complain and spoke with this operator who first asked me to tell him my name and number, which I did, I told him my name and number and then I explained the problem to him from the beginning, speaking clearly and carefully, the way one does in such circumstances, hoping to demonstrate through the reasonableness of one’s tone and the clarity of one’s language that one is a decent person with a legitimate grievance, whereupon he, the operator, said that he would connect me to customer service (I don’t know who he was, but evidently he wasn’t customer service), only as I was waiting to be connected to customer service, I received a call on the other line from another operator who said that she had a collect call for me from Michael Barrish, so I said, “I cannot be getting a collect call from Michael Barrish because I’m Michael Barrish and in fact I’m on the other line right now with another operator making a complaint about a collect call I never made,” so she said, “Does this mean you won’t accept the charges?” so I said, “Of course it means I won’t accept the charges,” so she said, “Okay, I’ll tell him that,” at which point I switched back to the other line and got the very same operator, the one I had just spoken to, the one I had told that I would not accept the charges, and she reported that my collect call could not go through because this person, Michael Barrish, was not accepting the charges, so I told her, I said, “Look, I’m Michael Barrish, I’m the same person you just talked to, and I’m not trying to place a collect call, I have a complaint,” to which she said (you hear this coming, don’t you? this is the really the only thing she could have said that followed the logic of all that preceded it and yet trumped that logic, as it were, rendering it null and void, much like the ladder that Wittenstein speaks of at the end of Tractatus, the one that must climbed in order to be discarded), “Okay,” she said, “I’ll connect you to customer service.”