Pick your poison

You're head of a department with a meager budget. Would you rather

• Attend a 90-minute mandatory training session on new purchasing processes that are convoluted, inefficient, and demoralizing, or
• Ignore the new processes and run the risk of facing harsh sanctions outlined in bold red print on multiple PowerPoint slides (because this time they really, really mean it), or
  
• Buy everything out of your own pocket?

You've run out of your blood-pressure medication but the prescription can't be filled until you fix a glitch in your online medical record. Would you rather

• Sit in your car in very cold weather listening to bouncy hold music while waiting to talk to someone at your doctor's office who can fix the glitch, or
• Turn on the car and let it idle so that you can have some heat during your 20 minutes on hold while the tiny Puritans who live inside your head brew up cauldrons of guilt about your carbon footprint, or
• Decide that, on the whole, you can probably survive a while without your blood pressure pills?

For reasons the rest of the world struggles to understand, you insist on living in a rural area lacking cell-phone reception and therefore rely on a landline at home--a landline prone to outages when the weather gets too wet, too hot, or too cold. When a winter storm hits and your landline provides a sharp shriek instead of a dial tone, would you rather

• Explain the problem to an online bot that responds onto to certain key words and insists that the technician who will be sent out to check on the problem will need to communicate with you via cell phone to confirm the service time, or
• Tag-team with your spouse to make sure someone is at home all day just in case the technician shows up when the bot says he might show up, or
• Drive five miles down the road and sit in your car on a very cold evening using your cell phone to try to reach an actual human being who can understand the situation and schedule a technician without demanding that he be able to reach you by cell phone in an area where there is no cell-phone coverage, which is the whole reason why you must have a functioning landline, or
• Decide that, on the whole, connectivity is overrated and cancel your landline service?