I'll Call You Back

A couple of posts back, I wrote a piece exaggerating my hatred for green beans. And while it’s true that I do hate green beans – which are one of the few foods that I can say taste truly repulsive to me – there are plenty of other things I hate more.

One of those things is the telephone. While it is a great tool for communication and I cannot fault its role in the development of information sharing technologies, I find it intrusive and annoying. There have been too many times when I’ve sat back to relax for the evening and had the shrill ring of a telephone interrupt whatever I’ve thrown on the television to watch. Or take a couple of minutes ago, for example. I had a vlog playing on my laptop in the dining room (which is where I prefer to make camp and write) and I had gone into the kitchen to get something to drink when what should begin its overly loud and piercing shriek but the phone. Suddenly, I can’t listen to what I’m trying to listen to and someone else is trying to make a demand upon my time over a device that I’m already irritated by in the first place.

Now, this wasn’t so bad when I lived on my own. Often, I would turn my cell phone down to a low volume, or if I particularly didn’t want to be disturbed, I’d set it to vibrate only. If it was on but quiet, I could hear it go off but it wasn’t so annoying that I couldn’t continue doing whatever it was that I saw more important than chatting on the phone. The other benefit of the cell phone was that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis have individual ring tones so I can tell by sound who is calling me, thus making the determination on whether or not I want to talk back. Caller ID does the same function, I suppose, but considerably more effort goes into finding the phone and having to physically check to see who it is on the other end.

However, here at my parents’ house, only one phone has Caller ID and that is the phone in the basement. Also, instead of being at a low volume, all of the phones (with the exception of the one in my bedroom) have their volume turned to high so that the ringing phone can be heard throughout the entire house. That’s right: four telephones ringing loudly every time some church lady, family member, or telemarketer decides they want a moment of my parents’ time.

For the life of me, I don’t understand how they can take it. I mean, despite having an answering machine and allowing whoever it is to leave a message so that they have the vaguest inkling of whether or not the phone call is worth their time, they actually answer the phone more often than not. Some of the times, they even have the gall to complain afterwards about how often they talk on the phone and how they had other things they needed to be doing. The simple solution: don’t answer your phone then. Give up being a slave to calls and let ‘em leave a message on the machine. If it is important (and so often it isn’t) then call them back.

Okay, perhaps this makes me sound selfish. Maybe even “elitist.” But I’m a firm believer that when it comes to my time, I need to be selfish and do with it what I want. We each only live once (that we know of), so we should make the most of it. In order to do that, sometimes we have to forget that other people exist for awhile. Then, when we come back and someone else has something where they’d really like my attention and they get some of my time, hopefully it has more meaning to them. I know for myself, that when I do that, it makes the times where other people enter my world that much more meaningful too.