For someone who loves chatting, I’ve been having my fair share of telephone issues lately. And not even the sort of phone issues that I am accustomed to having because I am at heart a spazzy and destructive person who decimates cell-phone civilizations with a single searing glance (read: I often drop my phone out of two story windows, or into toilets) but a more emotional variety of phone distress.
In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.
In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.
To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.
As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.
I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.
See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.
She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.
SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.
And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.
And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.
In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.
In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.
To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.
As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.
I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.
See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.
She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.
SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.
And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.
And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.
2 comments:
unlisted phone. YOU WISH!
whatever man.
love,
suingi
oh yeah...post...blah blah blah
you, my dear friend/middle aged sister...have too much free time-
also unhook the phone, thats what i do. House phone are soooo 2007.
On a side note: the coke machine at work stole like 3 bucks from me...so i jabbed a popsicle stick in it
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