Ever since I understood the importance of girls, I understood the importance of the telephone, which was thus: the telephone was the way in which girls contacted me. (Isn't it weird how "got in touch with", "contacted", "reached"—all phrases having to do with touching or the attempted touching with hands—are synonyms for "establishing communication between". Or is it just normal?) In high school, and well into university, there would usually be at least one—the number was almost always exactly one—girl who would call me every day or every other day. I never figured out, nor really do I care, why, but conversations would always last longer than 15 minutes, usually with the young attractive female dominating the conversation. That was, as geeks are wont to say, a feature and not a bug, since I generally dislike talking and generally like the sound of the human female's voice, and I'm what people often refer to as a "good listener", meaning frequent usage of "uh huh" or "really?" or "but what about...?".
Since there's no such close female friend in my life, or, rather, no close female friend who's has me at a "local"call—depending on how a company defines "long distance"—away, I spend most of my free time glued to a computer screen. That's probably a bad thing, not least because the time I spent on the bus writing everything you've hopefully just read could probably have been better spent asking the cute girl who kept looking at me (must be the new shirt, jeans, shoes and attitude that came along with the clothes) "do I know you?" following up with, if necessary, "should I?". At least finally the greater part of the time spent glued to a computer is spent doing paid, fun work.
My phone, to return to my original subject, is somewhere in my apartment. I know this because I heard it last night running out of battery power. For every day except one this week, I left my phone at home, treating it as a land-line. That last statement would be a lot closer to the truth if I checked messages regularly, and would be even closer to the truth if I bothered to check messages at all. To misquote one rapper and accurately quote another but in the wrong context since he was talking about girls calling him incessantly, I have 99 problems and life would be more interesting if a girl was one of them, and these days I don't answer my phone. Moving on to That Which Was Not Written While On Public Transit, another (fixable) (technological) problem is that my phone is entirely too quiet, so while it rings and displays a cute blinking red light during and after doing so, I'm usually either not within audible range of my phone or it's in my backpack while I'm on the bus, which is loud. (But cheap!) So that's just a matter of buying a new, louder model phone, which, no doubt, does other stuff to interrupt me like display notifications to events I said publicly that I'd attend. Display of the people or phone numbers calling me has given me the ability to just not answer phone calls from undesirables. Luckily—it's not yet clear for whom—no such people exist.
Today the thought occurred to me—and it's not important where the following occurred to me, just know that it happened—that I should just forward my phone to the office. That way I'm a) required to answer the phone, b) someone will answer if I'm not there, or c) people who don't know where I work will be confused. There's also the possibility that people who do know where I work will leave a humourous message, confusing or amusing my co-workers (or both!) thereby embarrassing me for about 5 minutes. Which is about 5 minutes too long. So I probably need to go with a fifth option, which involves something like getting a good phone that I take everywhere. I would still reserve the right to not answer it, though.
