A girl I knew told me you can’t kiss a voicemail.
She followed it up with some other comments that I choose not to share in these opening paragraphs and perhaps not ever.
Hell, talk about the stories I could tell or how if they were paintings they would be a mix of Chagall, Picasso and Da Vinci.
The kind of masterpiece that have an ethereal and magical quality that leave you speechless, breathless and shocked because you know you are seeing something that doesn’t just come along but once a generation or something like that.
But that isn’t what this post is about or where I want you to go.
Instead I want you to think about how awful some people are at leaving a short voicemail.
Bring Back Rotary Phones
Sometimes I miss busy signals and rotary phones.
The days when you let the phone ring eight times because it was acceptable to give people a chance to get to the phone.
And if they didn’t pick up after six to eight rings you hung up and went about your business.
Sure there were moments where you were frustrated because you had something truly important to speak with them about, but those were rare.
Now we’re angered when voicemail doesn’t pick up after 3-4 rings and aggravated when you can’t leave a message because the damn mailbox is full.
Sometimes I think about giving those people an answering machine with little tapes to record the messages.
Tapes that I would fill with ridiculous messages and commentary about life or perhaps a dramatic recitation of me reading from the phone book.
In the good old days that was the sort of silly joke that people loved, especially if the machine showed multiple messages and you couldn’t get there without fast forwarding through Wilner’s Dramatic Yellow Pages Reading.
People used to pay good money to listen to me pretend to be Pavarotti singing through the list of plumbers.
Or maybe it was pay me to stop singing, it is hard to remember.
Damn cellphones killed one of my source of income.
BJs
I got stuck in a BJ’s parking lot today out in Mesquite, or more accurately I got stuck on multiple work calls.
My intention had been to stop and a get a quick bite and take care of some minor paperwork but good intentions don’t always pan out.
Instead of getting in and out I sat there pumping my leg against the floor, desperately hungry while stuck on call I couldn’t get off of.
It was one of those moments that rub you raw because you are so close enough you can practically taste, touch and feel but still so far away it just doesn’t matter.
Just when I thought the conversation would end and I would be free to go grab lunch things took a turn and I knew I had the good fortune to be parked in front an establishment that wasn’t going to be able to feed me today.
No sir, no ma’am, it was clear that the free time I thought I had was going to go away and I was going to have to forego lunch.
****
Ninety minutes later I pulled out of the parking lot and started racing to a meeting I couldn’t be late for.
Five minutes after I hit the highway I played one of messages I had received while I was on the BJs call and heard Karma calling.
Multiple minutes of mumbling and some garbled musings and a request played through the speakers and I wished I could just fast forward or delete.
But I couldn’t do that.
There was no beginning, middle or end to the story and question on it. It was like Waiting For Godot knowing that Godot wasn’t coming.
And so I just smiled and figured it was payback for one of the Pavarotti Plumbers sessions.
These things happen.
