Please Verify Your Account

We need to make sure it’s really you.

Adeline Dimond
3 min readJan 27, 2022

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Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

Please enter the last four digits of your birth year. Please enter the last four digits of your social security number. Please enter your house number. No, not that house, the other house. The one you lived in with five roommates. Great. Please enter your zip code.

Please enter your major in college. Press 1 for liberal arts, 2 for social sciences, 3 for STEM. Okay, I see you pressed 1. What were you thinking? No wonder your interest rate is so high. Please enter your dog’s name.

Please enter the age you were when you lost your virginity. Wow, okay. Please enter the first name of your first sexual partner. Larry, really? Please enter his height. Please enter Larry’s marital status. Press 1 for married, 2 for divorced, 3 for single, and 4 for don’t know. I see you pressed 4. Is Larry not on social media? We’ll have to verify your account another way.

Please enter the city your mother was born in. Please enter the city your father was born in. Please enter the reason your great-grandparents fled to the United States. Press 1 for pogroms, press 2 for famine, press 3 for economic hardship. Okay, pogroms.

Please enter your weight. Please enter your height. Please enter your BMI. That BMI does not match your height and weight. We will have to verify your account another way.

Please enter the license plate of your new car. It was nice of us to finance that, wasn’t it? Please enter your mileage for 2021. Wow, not driving much, are you? Why are you staying home so much?

Please enter your COVID vaccination status. Press 1 for vaccinated, press 2 for unvaccinated because it’s medically contraindicated, press 3 for tin foil hat. I see you pressed 1. You really should be getting out more. Your vaccination status and mileage do not match. We will have to verify your account another way.

Please enter your greatest fear. Press 1 for dying alone. Press 2 for hahaha trick question, everyone’s greatest fear is dying alone.

We have run out of ways to verify your account. Press 1 if you would like to speak to an actual human agent. Press 2 if you would like to give up on accessing your account.

I see you pressed 1. Nice. The human spirit is indefatigable sometimes, isn’t it? But you may not speak to a live human agent because our corporate shareholders want us to cut costs and you know, what can we do? If we piss them off we risk a derivative shareholder lawsuit, which is way more annoying than our customers screaming and crying on the phone.

Goodbye.

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Adeline Dimond

Federal attorney, writing thought crimes on Medium. To connect: Adeline.Dimond@gmail.com