When the phone rings that early in the morning either someone has died or it’s a government agency. Sometimes the former seems less painful.

This day it was the latter. The woman introduced herself with a surname containing more accents and diacritics than one Slavic mouth could hold. She was calling about some important paperwork I recently submitted.

“You can’t quite do it that way,” she said followed by instructions that didn’t seem too absurd. Write this letter, submit that. Do it quickly, preferably today. That was followed by her telephone number repeated slowly two times.

“Call me anytime if you ever need help.”