I Can’t Remember What I Was Supposed to Call this Column
It’s tempting – very tempting - to say that I’m losing my mind. The problem with that particular phrase, “losing”, implies that it is a process that is just underway, that I started, at some point in the distant past, with a full command of my faculties. Unfortunately, that would not be entirely accurate.
My wife forced me, practically at gunpoint, to buy a cell phone when we were still dating. She was fed up with the fact that I never called her. The truth, however – and this must have been profoundly disturbing to her when it finally sank in - isn’t that I never called her; I called her often. Unfortunately, I could only vaguely remember her phone number and kept calling some poor woman whose number differed from hers by one digit. I eventually wrote the correct number on a slip of paper and put it in my wallet, but this didn’t completely solve the problem, because I kept forgetting that I had put it there.
So, as I say, my wife bought me a cell phone so that she could catch me in the car, particularly as I circled her block, trying to remember which house was hers. I eventually overcame my deep misgivings about being the type of person who owned a cell phone and even came to enjoy using it.
Unfortunately, this brought about another set of problems. The whole point of owning a cell phone is that you generally use it when you are away from home or your desk, annoying other diners in restaurants or drivers behind you in traffic – places, in short, where you don’t have access to an address book. (Yes, I realize that my cell phone had some sort of electronic address book, but I could never remember how to use it and kept accidentally calling the Verizon service number to order pizza.) So, I recently upgraded to my current cell phone, which has two main advantages:
1) It is a flip-phone, with which I drove my poor wife nearly insane for the first month or so that I owned it by pretending I was on Star Trek and talking in a bad imitation of William Shatner.
2) It has a very cool voice recognition feature that allows me to call people without actually dialing their number. I simply press one button and an amiable voice says, “Name, please”. I say a person’s name and my phone actually calls them. How cool is that?
It’s ironic that my dependence on this second feature, one designed to idiot-proof my cell phone experience, is what currently has me in trouble.
It was extremely early when I left for work on Monday. On one hand, it is always early when I leave for work, but this was Monday-morning-early, if you know what I mean. I’d like to say that I had a lot on my mind and was distracted, but the truth is that it was early on a Monday morning and I didn’t really have a mind at all, and that is how I got all the way to work – a one-hour commute away – without my laptop computer.
Fortunately, my wife has more on the ball than I do (which sort of goes without saying), and noticed that I had forgotten the laptop. She commutes at about the same time I do, although in a different direction, so she grabbed my computer as she got into her car. She could, she reasoned, call me on my cell phone, have me pull over to the side of the road and she could hand it over to me with a roll of her eyes.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten to plug my phone in the previous Friday and it was dead, so my wife kept getting my voice mail. She, assuming that I was temporarily out of range, kept driving and calling, driving and calling, becoming less and less amused, until she eventually found herself at my place of work, a full hour-and-a-half away from her office.
Even more unfortunately, I had also forgotten my keys, and so when I got to work and found myself the first one there, I decided to take a drive for half an hour or so until someone else got to work and opened up. When my wife drove into the parking lot shortly thereafter, it was completely empty.
Later in the day, I checked my email and discovered an ice-cold email from my wife describing what her morning had been like. I realized that this was a situation that called for immediate damage control, so immediately called her on her cell phone, dialing from my hazy memory of the number I used to have in my wallet.
“Hello,” said a distant and suspicious voice on the other end.
“Hi, Baby,” I said in my most contrite tone of voice. “Still mad at me?”
A full three or four seconds went by before the poor woman on the other end of the line sighed.
“Yes,” she said, “but only because you keep mistaking me for your wife.”
