Annoying phonecalls...

Read Dave Barry here. I can't seem to link directly to the article so here goes...


Lesson in futility just a phone call away

Today, I want to CLICK. Excuse me. Okay. Today, I want to talk about CLICK.

Excuse me again. Okay, where were we? Oh, yeah, I was saying that CLICK. Never mind, just ignore it. I was saying that I want to CLICK about this major stride forward in CLICK phone technology called "call waiting," which is such a big CLICKing convenience that I'd like to find the CLICK who invented it and. ...

No, wait, let me just calm down here. Some readers may not even know what I'm talking about. Some readers are probably living in backward, soybean-infested regions that don't even have the incredible convenience of "call waiting." So let me explain how it works: If you're on the phone with Party A, and Party B tries to call you, both you and Party A will hear an interruption noise, which alerts you to press your disconnect button so you can talk to Party B, who, trust me, has absolutely nothing important to tell you, so you say you'll call back and resume talking with Party A for 10 full seconds, until you hear another interruption noise indicating that you have a vitally unimportant call from Party C, and so on down the alphabet until Party A decides to drive over to your house and strangle you.

Doesn't this sound terrific, soybean people? Doesn't it sound modern? To give you a clear picture of what you're missing, let me compare "call waiting" to an everyday domestic situation. Let's say I'm having dinner with my wife and 8-year-old son, and my wife and I are discussing the kind of important issue that normal, mature, married adults discuss at dinner:

ME: It does WHAT when you flush it?

MY WIFE: It makes kind of a banging sound.

ME: A banging sound?

MY WIFE: Yes. And there are these little like electric sparks coming. ...

OUR SON (interrupting): How come. ...

MY WIFE: Robert, please don't interrupt.

ME: Sparks? MY WIFE: Yes, and they're. ...

OUR SON (interrupting): But I was just gonna ask you. ...

MY WIFE: Wait, Robert!

ME: There are sparks?

MY WIFE: Yes, they're coming from. ...

OUR SON: But this is IMPORTANT!

MY WIFE: ALL RIGHT, Robert. What IS it?

OUR SON: How come my left arm tastes saltier than my right arm?

"Call waiting" is very similar to this. It's kind of like an electronic 8-year-old who is simply incapable of shutting up while you are conversing with somebody else. The differences are that 1.) an 8-year-old does not have the gall to charge you a monthly fee for this service; and 2.) an 8-year-old can interrupt you only if he's in the same room, whereas with the incredible capabilities of "call waiting," your conversations can be interrupted by everybody in the entire world who has access to a telephone. It doesn't even have to be a person. A computer can interrupt you. In fact, through a combination of "call waiting" and "auto-dialing," it is now technically possible for your telephone conversations to be interrupted by a trained chicken.

It's just so darned convenient that I can hardly wait to see what exciting new services the telephone people will come up with next. Maybe they'll offer "call fabricating," wherein your phone becomes bored and rings for no reason; or "call misrepresenting," wherein your callers' voices are electronically altered so that you hear the OPPOSITE of what they actually said.

But what I, personally, would like to see - call me a dreamer - would be some kind of service wherein if you were talking to somebody and a third person tried to call either of you, your call could not be interrupted.

Instead, the third person would hear a special tone - we could call it a "busy signal" - telling him that a conversation was already in progress, so he'll have to try again later. But I doubt we'll ever see this come about.

The concept is far too complex to be grasped by a certain type of telecommunications consumer. I am thinking primarily of the chicken.

This is a classic Dave Barry column.

Originally published on November 26, 2005