Gooood morning. Office of Doctor Eli Zilch.

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You don’t end with a questioning tone. This is important. You have to end with an ambiguous lilt, the tone of which is impossible to indicate through punctuation on a page. The lilt substitutes for a question, a can-I-help-you, which, in my opinion, would be too subservient. No, you must lilt. We weren’t taking lunch orders. We were discerning the right kind of client. That was the impression, anyway. Most people able to pay the amount of cash we were asking needed to feel like not just anyone with that amount of cash could get into Zilch’s practice. Needless to say, anyone with that amount of cash could get in, but by the time I was done onboarding them, they would enter the waiting room as if they’d had to slay a dragon.

Zilch loved the drama that I brought to the position.…