UKRAINIAN VILLAGE—Reports are circulating that despite being widely considered the world’s most obedient man, John Verrante, 33, briefly considered not paying a hospital bill postmarked to his Cortez St. apartment after opening it and finding himself charged $8.76 for an X-ray he had done on March 14.
“They’re shaking me down for $8.76? What a load of horseshit,” said Verrante, who, in 2018 changed his shampoo, conditioner and deodorant because someone he was guarding in pick-up basketball said he smelled “too nice” to be hooping at the YMCA.
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“This is so bogus, I’m not paying this,” Verrante continued before crumpling the Rush University Medical Center bill up and disposing of it, briefly shrugging off the yoke of his wormlike obeisance to everyone and anything he perceives has power over him that has plagued him for the last 32 years of his life.
The full stack engineer, routinely mocked by his friend group for being so thoroughly housebroken he once thanked a police horse for its service, managed to remain steadfast in his insistence that Rush would not see one red cent from him for almost 15 minutes before he got nervous, just like when his mother asked him at age 15 if he really wanted to take bass guitar lessons after almost 8 years of piano, and fished the bill out of his simplehuman® brand trash can.
“I mean sure it’s ridiculous,” said Verrante as he clicked his Rush Medical MyChart login bookmark and exhausted every variation of his password “1LUvstrUctUr3!” before sheepishly clicking “forgot password,” and then “forgot username” just in case he wasn’t entering in that right either. “But what if I don’t pay this bill and then three months from now I really need treatment for something serious and they won’t see me because I didn’t give them their stupid $8.76?”
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Despite texting five of his closest friends a variation of “can u believe this lmao?” with an attached picture of the bill, artfully cropped to obscure an unsightly bolognese stain it had accrued in the trash, Verrante was pleased to see the site had saved his payment information from last time to make the billing process as painless as possible.
“I’m not really doing this, am I?” Verrante asked as his cursor hovered over the “pay now” button, almost as if visualizing the metaphorical Rubicon he stood on the shores of, forced to choose between making the choice to defy a single power structure in a symbolic gesture or locking himself into piggy mode for the rest of his life, before pathetically clicking confirm.
“Haha, it would’ve been so crazy if I hadn’t though, right,” he said. “That would’ve been nuts.”
