First Post

Payphones, and telephones in general hate me. Case in point:

My wife’s car has had a breakdown near her place of work. She sent word via a courier that she was ok, and at her mothers’ house, which is also near where she works. So I set out to call there, and see if there was anything I could do to be an immediate help, or if I needed to go get the car from along the roadside, or whatever else might need to happen.

This sounds like a far easier endeavor than it turned out to be.

My wife had our cell phone, which contains most of the numbers of our friends, social associates, family members and pretty much every decent restaurant within a 150-mile radius from our home. My memory for numbers has never been good, and for the most part the wife and I are almost always together when a phone call needs to be made. Except in a time like this. Keep this in mind, its going to come back to bite me in the behind as we progress.

So I dug around for my emergency number cheat sheet. I wrote this up because I know that I can not remember most phone numbers on a good day, and under duress I will totally blank. Want proof? Ask me for our phone number sometime. I cannot even recall what that is. I have several phone numbers memorized, but sadly, I do not have those phones anymore, nor do I live at those addresses.

So I used white pages dot kom (linked Here) and looked up the number. Nothing found, of course. So I expanded the search area. My In-Laws have an unusual English transmogrification of an old German name, so there are not all that many of them in the region to sort through, and I believe that I have met at least half of them over the past couple of years. If all else failed, I could always call a cousin and get the correct number. I finally found the correct number and wrote it down (recall that problem remembering numbers, and transposing them in my head from before).

Out to the trusty shop van to head off for a pay phone. Ok, rusty shop van is probably more accurate. The shop van is another whole entry on amusing mishaps and odd fortunes. It is a rear wheel drive, hollow metal box, which handles only acceptably on warm, dry roads. Today is cold, with a layer of freezing slush on the roads and more snow falling from above like the dander of the angels. Make that greasy dander of the angels. The van finds humor in going down the road sideways, as only rear wheel drive inanimate objects like cars and vans know how to do. So we slid and slipped our way to my old nemesis, the pay phone by the stoplight.

Now, I have never had good luck with phones in general, and payphones seem downright out to get me, so I approached this task with some trepidation. I picked my way from the trusty shop van to the evil pay phone over ice and snow banks. The first phone of the three in the bank was dead. No signal, no lights or anything. The second, while freezing cold against the ear, at least had a dial tone. I dialed the number and was informed by a pleasantish robotic voice that I needed $2.45 for the first three minutes. This seemed a bit excessive, but I wanted to make sure my wife was ok, so in went my coins. The phone rang three times and then a voice I did not know answered. I asked for my wife, then if I had the correct number. I did not. Though I was sure I had dialed correctly. Perhaps whitepages had an incorrect listing? So I hung up, and then tried to call the operator to get my money back. After several minutes standing in the cold, pushing buttons through the voicemail maze that is modern phone communication, I got to speak to a real, live person. She rattled her name off machinegun fast, and I only caught that is something about 20 syllables long. Her southern accent was thick, and I expected I had been connected to a call center far from here. I explained that I had apparently dialed an incorrect number in a polite, pleasant business like tone without being condescending or snide, as so many people tend to be on the phone. She was not quite as pleasant, nor as professional. After a short diatribe about people not being able to press the correct buttons, I was informed I would not be getting any sort of refund, and she was of the impression that I was simply trying to scam the phone company out of $2.45, as if I had a great system to get rich a few dollars at a time. Then she hung up on me before I could ask if there was someone else at her end I could talk to about this matter.

I was unhappy, but not yet angry. I tried the operator voice maze again, and once I found a person I was informed I could not get a refund, unless I knew which operator had answered the inquiry the first time, as it apparently cleared the phone record. That sounded like so much bull to me, and I told her so much so. In this day of computers that can keep track of every website I have ever clicked on, you should be able to tell that someone made a phone call from this particular payphone fifteen or twenty minutes ago, and I could provide the number dialed if that would be of any assistance. I was told in no uncertain terms I would not be getting my money back and was again hung up on. Now I was much closer to the aforementioned anger. This is typical with payphones; almost every time I use them ends in anger, sometimes of the “David Banner turns into the Hulk” kind. I replaced the handset in the receiver with some force. About 14 times. Some of those missed their mark a bit. And I recall saying some loud words. I understand and speak just a little bit of German, and the thing I learned from that language was the wonderful custom of glueing old words together to make new, better, longer swear words. I used this skill for the span of time I was “trying” to “hang up” the phone.

I picked my way back to the trusty shop van far less carefully than I had made my way to the phone in the first place. And that was a mistake. I slipped on a flat section of ice, and in trying to keep the ground from kissing my ass, I managed to land on my right ankle. The last “good” one, that sort of works as the owner’s manual says it should.

Long story shorter…:

Had the right phone number, fell down the ladder in the house between the living floor and the computer lounge and got mangled further only to realize that my wife had our phone all along. Duh.

Yea, Yea, I ran out of rant time and energy.