THINGS I HATE
If there is one thing I hate, it's when I'm lying on some nice exotic
beach on some island with
an unpronounceable name and basking in the
thought of the twenty million I won in the lottery and the fact that
I'll never have to work again in my life and the bloody phone rings.
I don't know why it is, but it's always when I'm having a particularly
interesting dream, to say the least, that people with the sleeping
habits of fruit bats and the intellectual quotient of ostriches (whose
eyes are bigger than their brains) have the sudden urge to call us up.
They don't call at noon or at dinnertime or even say maybe ten or so in
the evening. They lie in wait until we are all cozily tucked up in our
beds, drooling into our pillows, before they call at freakin' one o'
clock in the morning.
Being the cursed light sleeper in the family, I wake at the first ring,
stumble to answer it at the second ring, and say, "Hello?"
And what usually happens is I hear total silence for maybe half a
minute, then the nocturnal moron hangs up.
What the hell...?
Was it a burglar casing our house to see if anyone would be around to
catch him? Or maybe some smuggler who got the wrong number? (They do
their runs at night, right?) Or a legitimate caller who was scared off
by the semi-conscious snarl in my voice? Or perhaps someone in our
family has some hot affair they're not telling me about.
It doesn't happen often enough that I'd suspect some crank callers, but
it irritates me to death because once I've gotten up I have
difficulty getting back to sleep again.
I also have difficulty ignoring it because I'm already awake at the
first ring anyway, and what if it were something important? Emergencies
and bad news usually come in the early hours of the morning, for some
reason.
When we
finally get modernized and technologized and catch up with the
rest of the world and--sigh--finally get one of those snazzy phones
that tell you everything but the weather--we'll have caller ID.
HahahaHA.
And then I'll get pen and paper and start listing all those idiots who
call us, and they better watch out, because then I'll drag myself out
of bed at some unearthly hour some days and start paying them back.
In the meantime, I think I'll just--sigh--maybe make some nocturnal
calls of my own and spread the misery.