A talk with a hospital chaplain

[Ron Obvious]

I was in hospital in San Diego a few months ago and was asked if I wanted to talk to a counsellor. "OK", I said, keeping the comma carefully outside the quotation marks, "why not?".

"The counsellor will be a chaplain; will that be OK?", they asked.

"Well, I'm not religious and don't want any proselytising, but otherwise that's OK", I answered.

So a very nice woman came by my room and we had a friendly chat lasting about 15 minutes. At the end, she asked if I had any objection to her saying a prayer for me. I don't know how most of you would feel about that, but I said it was OK, and got a brief, non-denominational prayer telling God what a lovely chap I was and to please push back my expiration date a bit further.

I thanked her and she left me with a smile and a piece of paper requesting a charitable donation to her organisation which I then promptly lost in the confusion afterwards.

I didn't think anything of it, but it turns out my wife had tried to call me during that time and was told I couldn't be disturbed because I was talking to a chaplain. She panicked because she quite reasonably assumed I'd either gone soft in the head or was otherwise receiving last rites. It didn't help that the cell phone service went out around that time and she couldn't get a hold of me for several hours during which time she assumed the worst. We had a good laugh over that later and that's not why I'm writing this now.

I opened (yet another) bill pertaining to that visit this morning and saw that I had been charged $400 for my 15 minute conversation with the chaplain!

I don't know if I should object to the charge (the insurance passed on paying for it) or what, but this was certainly an unpleasant surprise. I assumed I'd been talking to a kind-hearted volunteer. Frankly, I was just being polite! Shows you how naive I am, I suppose, and what being polite gets you these days...