Who am I today?

Don't you just love those automated telephone systems - press button zero if you want to ...

And you are?

After a while, once you've got the hang of how those work, it's not so bad, but have you encountered the next layer up - the ones acting as gatekeepers, where you have to answer questions before the machine will pass you through to speak to a real human being? This gives you a problem if you're not the person the machine would like you to be. I tangled with one of those recently, in the course of settling my mother's affairs.

Writers are used to pretending to be other people so, in the end, in order to talk to someone, that's what I had to do. Which probably makes me guilty of impersonation for the purpose of trying to sort out something involving money. (Trust me on this  - there is usually money involved somewhere.)

And then there are the forms - her address, my address, her date of birth, national insurance ...

As a result of all the phone calls and form filling messing with my mind, at any given point I can be a bit confused about who I happen to be at that moment. Of course writers have all sorts of people living in their heads most of the time, but I've never had to settle a bill for any of them. Yet.

Naturally too, being a writer, this idea is percolating in the back of my brain. There must be something I can use here in a story. Not sure yet what that might be - but there must be something.