I received a notice from the State of California Franchise Tax Board regarding a missing payment. I needed some help, so I tried calling their support line several times in the past two days. Each time, I followed the voicemail instructions and was put on hold. I would put it on speaker phone and do some charting. Each time, after about 20 minutes, I would inevitably get called to go see patients, so I would leave the phone on hold and go take care of things. When I returned, most of the time, I was STILL on hold. However, once in a while, when I returned, it was no longer on hold and the line was dead. I assumed that the operator came on and hung up on me because I wasn’t there. After playing this silly games about 5 times, I decided this morning to try another option. This time, when asked, I pressed the # for assistance in Spanish. I am fairly fluent in Spanish, so I figured I could try and see if the wait time was shorter. After 9 minutes, I got connected with a live operator. The funny thing is she answered by saying "This is Alicia, may I help you?", pronouncing her name A-LEE-SEE-A in a very Spanish way, but saying the rest of the words in English. We wound up having a 3 minute conversation in English. I got the information I needed and said a little prayer of thanks, reminding myself of the usefulness, sort of, of being multilingual.