Patrick Butler: Another Look

Last week I needed to call the answering service at work to retrieve any important calls. But when I went to my cell phone speed dial, the number wasn't there. Dimly recalling that my wife Janet ordered a new phone when mine went bad, I called her.

"That number was probably stored in your dead cell phone and not in your SIM card," she said. "The answering service number didn't transfer over."

That was the cell phone sent to replace the bad cell phone that went dead after just a few months. When that phone went bad, Janet violated the first rule of volunteering (don't) and entered the customer service wars to request a new phone.

She'll never make that mistake again. I saw my beautiful bride reduced to a bristling bundle of bad attitudes after wading through 45 minutes of international accents only to be told the warranty on my phone had expired, even though it was good for year.

"But we've only used this phone for six months," she said.

"Yes" the operator said in some kind of clipped British-type accent. "But our records show you had it in your possession for a year before you turned it on."

"Think about this for a minute," Janet said patiently. "Does it make sense to you that I would get a cell phone and not use it for a year?"

"I'll have to ask my supervisor," the girl said, and left Janet on hold. She told me all this in the interim.

Her foot-tapping kept me from asking her for a refill on my ice tea and kept me in the recliner where I belonged. Never, ever get in the way of a woman on a phone.

When Janet spoke again, it was evidently the supervisor who was authorized to reason. Janet's "sense" line was repeated and after a minute said "I appreciate that. Goodbye." She hung up and held her head in her hands, steam from the broccoli and cauliflower "health" food dinner curling her otherwise straight hair.

"A new phone is on the way," she mumbled. "You'll have it in three days. I have a headache."

"I'll take over," I said, jumping up and pulling some hot links out of the freezer. "You take a nap." Couples have to tag-team to get through today's technology or they're lost.

So when the new phone arrived I had four days of important voice mails waiting. I'd offended God-only-knows how many people who believed I was unresponsive

and I had to learn a new phone because the "old" one was already outdated.

Then came the day I needed to contact my work answering service. My misplaced dependence on a cell sent me scurrying to my little phone book, invented by Alexander Graham Bell. The number wasn't in it. I remembered I'd put it in the first now-dead cell phone, thinking "this is good enough."

I recalled I also had the number on an old newsroom cell I hadn't used recently, but that phone was I don't know where. I went to call it on my new cell phone to find it.

Boink!

My phone went deader than polyester leisure suits. Again.

Not to be deterred, I yelled for Janet to use her cell.

"I can't find it," she yelled back from the living room. "Call my phone on your phone."

Now it was my turn to have a headache.

"I can't believe this," I said as she walked into the room. "I need my dead phone to call your phone so we can call the phone that has the number to a phone that I can call so I can know who phoned me. I can't take it."

"Don't get upset," she warned. "You know what the cat did last time."

"It's OK," I mumbled. "The carpet is cleaned and my stitches are almost healed. But this is craziness. What am I going to do?"

"Ask God," she advised. "I have to go to work."

So I took a deep breath and asked God. After 10 seconds, I came upon the idea of relying on that outdated hard drive memory storage called the brain. I squinted hard and a miracle happened. The number came back from deep retrieval. Quickly jotting it down, with a pencil, I called the number and voila!

"No new messages" the mechanical voice said.

I sat in stunned silence as I took another look at the pencil in my hand, pondering what had just happened. The time, effort, emotion and inconvenience of relying on 21st century "advanced" technology was too much to pay when a technology invented in the 16th century, a pencil, would have worked just fine. This is often called "progress."

For some reason I thought "newer" meant "better," when in this case "older" meant "reliable." It put the whole idea of "dusty, old scriptures" stored in an outdated format -- a book -- in perspective.

I slowly, purposely, penciled in the number I'd remembered, in my patently absurd paper phone pages. Call me a troglodyte. I don't care. It's the pencil for me from now on.

Patrick Butler
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