I‘M SICK of my telephones; I miss my telephones.
First of all, that’s not the same type of thinking as “She loves me; she loves me not”–if it can ever be said that love has anything at all to do with thinking. I played that game when I was six, but just once, and the only thing I came away with was that picking petals was far less satisfying than building things and knocking them down; also, that to continue would lead to the complete defoliation of my mother’s garden, which, if past events were any guide, would lead to the complete defoliation of me.
Second, it has nothing to do with the logic of “The king is dead; long live the king,” which was an emblem of continuity and fealty from the kingdom’s most trusted advisors. This was always assuming, of course, that the kingdom’s most trusted advisors had not smothered the old king themselves, and were not currently chasing the new king around the dining room table with an ax.
So: I’m sick of my telephones; I miss my telephones. Let’s start with the latter clause.
I miss my old telephones, the phones from my childhood: One color, black, with the density of a neutron star, units so heavy that, once placed on the hallway table, they were simply not going anywhere ’til the house was torn down. This was a fine metaphor for children of any era: “The phone is stable, my parents are stable, my school is stable, my life is stable. And the Yankees won again.” Even in the tallest adult’s hand, that twenty-three pound receiver looked enormous, like a panicked crewmember from “Land Of The Giants” calling for pizza. Its weight implied dignity, and a two or three minute chat also provided a nice aerobic pump. These were phones that weren’t seeking to blend in, that looked strong and competent (and were), that dared someone not to notice them, that laughed at lesser devices. Another good metaphor, and this time for the United States itself.
Then, like all Americans, we moved on to The World Of Tomorrow with the next generation of those wonderful, colorful, rectangular jobs with the clear, plastic dials, the ones some folks took to dialing with pencils. You couldn’t dial the old black ones with pencils, not unless your entire objective was to go through a whole box of pencils. Those red and white and olive units (Why can’t I remember any other colors? I’m sure they had more) were, what, half the weight of the old ones? Less? Certainly light enough to hang on the kitchen wall. I remember my mom talking with the receiver wedged between her ear and shoulder, flipping something on the stove with one hand and snapping her fingers angrily at me with the other. (You remember those old mom-finger-snaps, bless them, as loud as the bolt of a carbine, and with the same fearsome promise.)
And their bells rang cheerfully. They didn’t hum or pulse or vibrate like today’s models, whose frightening signals make me think I’m getting a call from the fourth level of “The Andromeda Strain.”
The other thing I remember about those old phones is their cords, and how tangled they got. About every two weeks you’d have to unplug them and let the receiver twirl like Kristi Yamaguchi. Any longer than a fortnight, and you ran the risk of having to go through successive calls closer and closer to the phone until the final chat had you fogging up the dial with your breath. The thing is, I still have no idea how those cords even got that tangled up in the first place. So far as I recall, all I ever did was answer the phone, speak, and hang it up. I don’t believe I ever answered the phone, tossed it up like a baton, spun it like a Coke bottle, did a chimp-flip, and then hung it up. But, boy, they sure did get tangled.
The most important aspect, though, of the old phones is that they worked, and they worked simply. There were no panels of buttons and no confusing options, and we all did just fine without call-waiting. There was one phone company, they did a great job, and only one guy came to your house, and he was perfectly capable of putting in anything you needed.
What I’m sick of are my current phones. I don’t have the slightest idea what company I’m with, or who to call to fix something or put in a plug, and when we finally get the guy in the house, the only thing I seem to hear from him is, “Sorry, I can’t put it there.” Today’s phones have the pathetic heft of an empty milk carton, and their designs are as vacant as the average federal building. But even these insults I can take. It’s the cell phones that must be destroyed.
Okay, we all hate the morons who sit in the coffee shop across from you speaking in an inflated volume into what looks like a broken eyeglass-holder dangling from their ear. Even Mike Farrell would surelyagree that these people deserve the death penalty. And, certainly, just as egregious are the loud talkers walking down the street shouting into “regular” cell phones, or the three 15-year-old girls, friends, one supposes, strolling through the mall together, talking not to each other but into three parallel cell phones. (Perhaps they’re talking to three other girls walking in a parallel line through another mall. Or another universe.) And if not the worst, certainly the most dangerous is the young mother scorching down a residential street in her Ford Extinction, squealing around someone going the speed limit–me–with one hand on the wheel, one hand holding her phone, and still dexterous enough to flip up the middle finger of her wheel hand at someone–me, again–while never missing a beat in her animated conversation.
We all want to say something at these Kodak moments, and sometimes I do. When an idiot behind me on a line is talk-shouting into one of these goofy things, I have taken to turning around with my best smile and saying, “I beg your pardon?” Invariably, the jerk smiles back, covers the phone and says, “Oh, no, I’m on the phone.”
“Oops,” I say, giggling with embarrassment, “Forgive me. For a second I couldn’t tell, because you’re so loud, I assumed you were talking to me. Or offering fruit for sale to apartment dwellers in the surrounding tenements. Or calling the faithful to prayer. But you’re just in the middle of a vitally important phone call, aren’t you?” Watching their smiles fade is very rewarding.
And then, my friends, oh, and then. I turned my coat. Two months ago I bought one myself. I didn’t want one, but my agent said I never know when he might need me quickly (this, by the way, has never happened, and, I know, never will), and my wife said it was time for me to join the twenty-first-you-know-the-rest, but it’s not their fault. I could have said no (or something stronger), but I didn’t. I hate the thing. I virtually never have it on, I love seeing it run out of power, I haven’t set up the answering machine (or whatever it’s called) on it and everyone I know or work with is constantly complaining to me about it.
Well, two weeks ago I lost the phone. (Lost, or “lost”?) No problem there, but immediately my agent and my wife reunited for another campaign. I held out like Colonel Travis, but then Mrs. M. said, “That’s it. I’m going to get you another one,” and headed down the hill while I tip-toed to the garage and freedom. She called me at the office an hour later. She was down at the phone store, but in order to get another one I had to be there myself. “They won’t give me one if I’m not there?”
“No,” she said.
“Good. Then I’m not coming.”
I’m sure you’re all familiar enough with the ways of marriage to know that I was with her in the store twenty minutes later. Little did I imagine when I glided through those hushed doors that I was about to take part in one of the silliest conversations since the Council of Trent.
To begin with, I determined immediately that my physical presence at this transaction was as useless as a stack of Playboys at a NAMBLA meeting. That wasn’t my wife’s fault. The “Sales Associate,” 19, was just a wee bit of a cretin. No big deal, though. Let’s just get this over with, right? Not so fast, Sergeant Friday.
I grabbed the first phone I saw and tossed it on the counter. “I’ll take this one. Can you set me up right away?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Do you want a random number, or do you have a preference?”
“Well, I guess I’d like my old number.”
“The company can’t do that. But the good news is, if you want, I can get you a similar number.”
There was a long pause. My wife and I looked at him, and he looked at us. Then my wife and I looked at each other. A car door slammed somewhere in the parking lot, and someone laughed with pleasure. It certainly wasn’t me.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, I can get you a similar number.” He followed this with a big, warm smile. The morning was shot anyway, so I smiled back. Then my wife and I smiled at each other. Then the three of us began to giggle like maniacs at the fun of it all. When the rolling laughs subsided, I re-engaged.
“Oh, dear, that was a good one, eh? Now, forgive me–Todd, is it?–Forgive me, Todd, but it’s been a tense morning, and there’s so much traffic outside, and, what with all the ambient noise and all . . . For a second, I could have sworn you said that you could get me a similar number. This means . . . what? Three or four of the digits are the same?”
“Even better,” he said proudly. “Sometimes we can get you five or six of the same numbers.”
“I see. But not seven, of course, because that would then be the same number.”
“Right.”
My wife put her hand on my arm, but the beast was out.
“How about this: Can I get all seven of the same numbers, but jumbled?”
“Wow. No one’s ever asked for that.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Larry . . .” threatened my wife, to no avail.
“Let’s move on. So, if I want, I can get a similar number, and this gives my friends and loved ones the reassuring knowledge that, although they’re not actually speaking to me, they’re not that far off.”
Now he looked like the golden retriever who doesn’t know the ball is behind your back. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Really? So, in a sense, you’re losing me in the canyon.”
“Wh . . . What?”
“Okay, Larry, you’ve made your point.”
“I don’t think so, honey. What I said, Todd, was that you’re losing me in the canyon. You know how it is, the one time you actually need to talk to someone, the reception starts to go, and the other idiot says something like, you’re losing me in the canyon, and then the two of you wait ’til you’re back at a hard line, which is what sane grownups should have done in the first place. Or you’re trying to say goodnight to the kids, because you’re working late, and they can’t understand you, and you have to call back twelve times because the reception sounds like someone speaking through a Cub Scout walkie-talkie while crossing the River Styxx, and you’re holding up the shot, and the director is banging on the trailer door, but he’s not really mad at you, he’s angry because he’s just had the same non-conversation with his kids. Never mind that we’ll all probably have Spock-ears from these things in a couple of years.”
Todd’s jaw began to work wordlessly, and he took a step back. Somewhere behind me I sensed my wife raising a blunt object behind my ear. I was almost finished, anyway.
“And how in God’s name did that Arab guy in Vegas pick up a conversation between two terrorists in perfectly clear Islamic Pentameter? You know he made it all up. Unless, of course, the phone itself was too scared not to transmit the call. I guess we could all understand that.”
Naturally, a few minutes later, I was rolling back to the office, a hundred and eighty bucks lighter, an egg-sized wen on my mastoid, and a nice, new, plastic cultural outrage next to me on the seat. What the hell. No biggie. Just toss it in the drawer, wait a couple of weeks, take it out back to the dumpster, and lose it again.
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.
