A call for help
It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone. ~Mark Twain, Christmas greeting, 1890
Merlin has managed to read my mind again. I’m not posting to point that out, though; if you’re reading this, you know where to find 43 Folders, after all.
No, my deal is that I really really sympathize with commenter Brad, who is like me in that he hates the damn telephone.
This is getting to be a problem.
Actions in my queue that begin with the word call may as well end there, were I to be truthful to myself about my true intentions (a rare phenomenon that happens approximately once per year and has been sighted cohabiting with Elvis). They are dead cards. Pariahs. The other cards tremble and quail, creeping quietly away from the “call” card, so as not to be contaminated with its psychic taint.
Bereft of friends and support, the “call” cards turn bad, and drift delinquent around my worktable, playing hooky, sometimes (I suspect) mugging the younger cards for their lunch money. Some grizzled veterans have been in and out of the Someday/Maybe lockup so often that it doesn’t seem worth it to go through the motions, and they end up on the edge of the table, where they glare balefully at me, their graphite-smudged edges fuzzy from handling.
It really doesn’t help that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool nocturne, whose brain only really begins to wake up at somewhere around nine in the evening (or, as I call it, noon). So I do all the stuff that you might reasonably expect to do in preparation for a call the night before; jot notes on the back of the “call” card, gather everything together that might be covered and clip it to the card, grab the cell phone and place it suggestively on the pile of actions that really desperately need a phone call.
And the next day, I put the calls off until… oh. Hm. Let’s say, after another cup of coffee, I lie to myself, convincingly. After all, I did just try to clean my ears with a toothbrush, clearly I am not in my right mind. Let me cram more stimulants into my already confused and overcrowded brain so that I can feel even more anxious at the thought of making twelve stressful and overdue phone calls. That seems like a good idea. Twelve cups of coffee later, I have forgotten the phone calls because I am busy trying to pluck my eyeballs off the ceiling, and in any case I wouldn’t be any good on the phone at that point, because the coffee has reduced my ability to communicate to the level of a sugar-crazed crack poodle.
And then something happens, one of those middle of the day things that usually has to be taken care of right there. Like a malfunctioning hydraulic something or other, with a name and part number that sounds distressingly like one of those Pentagon inventory items whose sole purpose is to keep some congressional district or other employed. Except, your plumber informs you when you comment on this, that this particular something is no longer made on this side of the planet, and is only found in the tool hordes of Alaskan midget plumber tribes, which means that the something would, in fact, be quite a lot cheaper were it really a gold-plated Pentagon extravagancy.
You’ll be needing two of them, he adds.
And by the time that’s been taken care of, it’s after six in the afternoon and there’s no point in trying to call anyone, is there?
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
So. The point of this sad, sordid story, besides giving my insomniac brain something to think about besides the fact that I’m about four days overdue for a good review, which I would do were I not afraid to look at all the incredibly overdue things that are sitting on my worktable downstairs, is… well, a call for help.
(Yes, yes, I know. Obviously. A laugh riot, you are.)
I need a good way to handle call actions that doesn’t automatically induce a gut wrenching cringe from the moment I write it down. How do I do that? Because humor aside, this is a real problem, and telling myself to suck it up and just do it is not doing a heck of a lot.
Assume that calling the moment I think of the action isn’t possible; I do that whenever the time zone allows.
What can I do? Anyone?
Bueller?
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