"Just pay the $204.37 and we'll get you set up to start using it again," said the agitated Indian man, who veritably appreciated his job, to a seemingly even more agitated man named James.


"Oh, no way. I'm never using credit again for my entire life," retorted James, almost in a reassuring way, but with a tone of rancor in his unnaturally high pitched voice.


"You didn't like using your credit card?" asked the Indian man, who truly was shocked, for he was under the impression that Americans loved using promises for currency.


"No, I loved it! But that's the problem: loving credit is far worse than hating it. I'm never using credit again for my entire life!"


That weekend James bought a pair of Vans shoes, two deep V-neck T-shirts, and one hamburger meal from the local Burger Purveyor using his newly restored credit card. On the phone with the same Indian man he reassured that THAT was his last time using credit.


"This is the last call to me you'll ever make," James lied, "goodbye forever."


After the deal was made over the phone, his bill paid, James went running for scissors.


"I was going to cut my credit card in half, when I fell," he explained to the male nurse tending to the large laceration in his stomach, "now I have to use it to pay for this hospital visit, because I have no more money in my bank, because I used it to pay for this card."


"Why don't you stop using credit?" the nurse asked, more intrigued than perplexed by James' story.


"When?"

"When what?"

"When should I stop?"

"When did you start?" the nurse asked.

"I don't remember. How should I know?! You know, you're a real jerk. Just fix me up."


Unperturbed by the patient's predictable cantankerousness, the nurse finished patching up the patient's inadvertently self-inflicted wounds, and left him in an apathetic manner, as if he loved his job. James felt slightly better, and fell into a deep slumber unnaturally fast. He was in the middle of a dream in which he lay in a pulchritudinous green grass field in the archaic Persian nowhere when an expected call on his cell phone ripped him from peace into reality.


"Yes, I'll be able to make the payment, you jerk."


That's all James said, leaving the Indian man hurt and confused.