The story is told about Degas dining at the home of his contemporary, the painter Jean Louis Forain, a 19th-century gadget freak who had one of the first telephones in Paris. Forain gleefully showed his phone to the grumpy and greatly unimpressed Degas. During the meal, the telephone rang, and Forain leapt from the table to answer it. “Ah, the telephone,” Degas is reported to have remarked, “now I understand: It rings, you jump.” Degas was a harsh reactionary, and a pretty good anti-Semite in the bargain, but I am coming to take his line on the subject of the telephone.
Please know that I am a man who has two lines and five phones in a six-room apartment, a car phone, an answering machine, and the ambiguous little service known as “call-waiting.” I do not yet walk around With a cellular phone in my pocket, and, in what I am sure will be the not-too-distant future, I plan to eschew the possibility of a telephone implant.
I used to be a phone fan. I am old enough to go back to people having what were called “party lines,” which weren’t the position of the American Communist party on the Scottsboro boys but the sharing between two or more families of a single telephone line. I remember a man from the phone company coming to our apartment every month to count, with great flourish and rapidity, the nickels we inserted to make our calls. I recall, too, the mixture of pleasure and economic terror when longdistance calls were made or came in. The art of the long-distance call was to say everything that had to be said in under three minutes.
But nowadays the entire phone game, for all its added convenience, seems to have got wildly out of hand. In the past few years, I have had three different area codes: the pleasing 312, the rhythmic 708, and (currently) the hopeless 847. I have yet to master the etiquette of call-waiting. No matter how charming the person I am talking to, when I hear that little call-waiting bleep, I feel I must be off, for my next caller just might be more charming still.
Although I can myself be a telephone schmoozer of major-league quality, sometimes, if a phone conversation goes on too long, I am pleased that the little bleep calls me away. Only on rare occasions, to get rid of a caller even more garrulous than I, have I straight-out lied and said, “Oh, hell, there’s my callwaiting. I’d better run.”
Answering machines allow the strange twist of calling someone you don’t wish really to speak with and hoping instead to get his or her answering machine. I get a call every few years from a woman who always begins, “Oh, Joe, you’re there!” Is she, I wonder, hoping for my machine and disappointed to get me?
When I see people talking on cellular phones in restaurants I find myself mildly ticked off, though I am somehow able to restrain myself from sending the waiter around to their tables with copies of Walden. More and more people seem to have cellularized themselves. The other day I was with a man who had to transfer his phone from his right hand to his left to shake hands with a cousin who had to do likewise with his phone. A good friend of mine used to bring his cellular phone to lunch with me in a Chinese restaurant so that he could check closing stockmarket prices. “Ah, Mitter Rosenfield,” the owner of the restaurant one day asked him, “how da mahket?”
What comes closest to driving me back to Western Union, not to say the Pony Express, however, are the new telephone menus that greet you with a long list of options, none of which, it is almost certain, is likely to fit your requirements. Banks and other large institutions seem to have this down nicely. The other day I called the New York Times to speak to a man named Goldberg. After being put through the menu and tapping a couple of different digits, I was finally instructed to tap in the last name of the person I was trying to reach. It turns out there are 19 people named Goldberg working at the New York Times. It’s enough to cause a simple country boy to get rid of his touch-tone phone.
At another, much smaller firm, none of the menu items met my needs, so I was directed to tap in 0 for the operator. Instead of the operator, however, I kept getting the voice-mail of someone named Kathy. Discouraged, I hung up. When the woman I was attempting to reach called me, I explained my trouble in getting through her telephone system. “I tried for the operator,” I said, ” but I kept getting someone named Kathy.” “Oh,” the woman said, “she is the operator, but just doesn’t like to be called that. It’s an identity thing, I guess.” Just then I remembered the final convenience of the telephone: the use of my twelve-foot phone cord for strangulation.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
