Note: This column appears in the 3/4 issue of The Glendale Star and the 3/5 issue of the Peoria Times
I’m not much of a phone person in that generally, I don’t prefer to talk on the phone. I would say that I am in the mood to talk on the phone approximately twenty minutes throughout the course of a given calendar year. What an actual phone can do however, as far as texting and letting me know who is calling so that I don’t have to answer, which allows me to better avoid actual conversations, has been great and has, ironically, made me more of a phone person.
As a result of that, or as result of me being considerably less popular than I think I am, not many people actually call me. In fact, save for my wife and parents, nobody calls me.
Under normal circumstances -– as in, if I were normal -- this would be fine. But for some odd and illogical reason, I still expect people to call me. I am equally annoyed by people calling and not calling. My own cell phone has an automatic keypad-locking feature that activates when the phone hasn’t been in use for like two seconds. So I have to unlock the keypad at least 50 times per day just to confirm that nobody has called me. I use infinitely more battery power on my phone confirming that no one has called than I do using the phone to actually communicate.
(I would just turn off that feature except that I have been known to accidentally make impromptu and profane phone calls, from my pants, to random people on my contact list. Yet another reason I’m not a phone person.)
It’s become a running joke between my wife –- whose Blackberry is constantly buzzing, by the way –- and I. Whenever I have to turn my phone off for any length of time, like before church, I’ll excitedly turn it back on later and ask my wife to guess how many people called me. She laughs as I patiently give the phone time to load…then more time…backlight is off…nobody called.
There have been Saturdays when I have mistakenly left the phone in the bedroom for almost the entire day, and upon realizing this, I will rush upstairs –- it’s Saturday! Somebody could be calling me to watch the game! –- only to be disappointed yet again.
But I reached a new low last weekend. My wife likes to play this little trick on me where she, unbeknownst to me, changes my ring to this awful ringtone that begins with a horse neighing very loudly. Last Monday morning when she wasn’t home, it went off and scared the crap out of me. It should also be mentioned that it went off because my mom was calling me…back. My mom was calling me back.
When she got home later I admitted to her that she got me. But instead of laughing as usual she sympathetically came over to me, rubbed my arm, and informed me that she had changed the ringtone days ago, well before the weekend. She had even considered asking my brother-in-law to call me just so she could hear the horse go off.
Whatever. I don’t even like talking on the phone. Texting is so much better anyway. In fact, somebody could be texting me right now…
Neigh.
