HE JUST KNOWS
He doesn’t know how he knows but he knows. He knows the phone is about to ring. He just knows. He can feel it. It’s a sensation as real as any other day-to-day sort of feeling. It’s electric and numbing. It starts in his fingers. Slowly at first and then... RIIIINGGG! A phone nearby rings.
He’s told this all to his fiancée before. She thinks it has ‘something to do with radio waves or whatever’ and she might just be right. But whatever it is, he knows that he knows when the phone is about to ring. That’s about all he knows, really.
He can’t tell you when a cell phone will ring, though. Landlines only. Cellular is a telephonic blind spot.
It makes for a neat party trick (if you’re at a party with a landline telephone, that is). The whole ‘landlines only’ factor might lend credence to the radio wave theory but he’s not sure. Maybe it also disproves it. He doesn’t know. The only thing he knows for sure is that in a few seconds, the phone in his kitchen will ring, and then it does and then he answers it and that is that.
This skill, this knowing, is particularly useful in one environment above all others: the workplace. Knowing when a landline telephone will ring at the workplace is invaluable. It’s like knowing a car is about to hit you with just enough time to move and sidestep the hit. It’s exhilarating, this knowledge. A genuine thrill. Knowing what he knows, knowing that the landline in his cubicle is about to ring, means knowing when to stand up and promptly make his exit from said cubicle. In short: knowing when your work phone is about to ring means never having to answer it.
It’s simple. It’s truly, magically, straightforwardly simple. When his fingers start to tingle. When his thumb goes numb... He’s out of there! In a flash. Always gone right before the ringer BLEEEAATS(!!!) out across the office. No business calls for him. Not a one. No, thank you. Leave a message, please. He’s up, out of his chair, and halfway to the bathroom before even an iota of tone fills the air.
‘A person could get into some serious workplace trouble over this sort of behavior’, you might think. And under normal circumstances, you might be right. But these are no normal circumstances. He knows things no normally-circumstanced person would know. He just knows.
His co-workers suspect he might suffer from some sort of overactive bladder problem. Why else would he frequent the bathroom so often and with such haste?
However, as you now know, this is not the case. In fact, he is an accountant with a normal bladder and a full voicemail box. Extra-full, in fact, and always getting fuller somehow. These are important calls too. He knows that they are. He has no problem listening back to the recordings and dialing out to the numbers. It’s the answering. The picking up the phone. That’s what terrifies him. His ‘hello’ overlapping someone else’s. The pause that always follows.
He’s very lucky then that he is a man of one talent. He, uniquely, can avoid such ‘hellos’. By dialing out and remaining silent, waiting for the other person to ‘hello’ first, he remains blissfully in control. He alone wields the power of absolute telephonic prescience and control. Except when it comes to cell phones, of course.
He could kind of, sort of, tell when a flip phone was about to ring. The bigger the antennae, the more of a tingle he’d feel. Smartphones however are cutting-edge dead-ends for him. They give him nothing. They leave him feeling naked. Lost. It’s for this reason that he doesn’t carry a smartphone and has requested that his fiancée do the same. ‘They’re little pocket agents of the unknown. Startling devils that operate in the periphery. Never in the light’, he tells her often. Daily. Word-for-word.
One time, when he was very young, he managed to convince his aunt to take him to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum which was briefly home to a traveling exhibit showcasing the nation’s first telegrams and included an original, prototype phonograph. You cannot begin to imagine the buzz he felt that day. It was a 300 MHz band high he’s been chasing ever since.
The second biggest problem he encounters on the day-to-day (cell/smart/flip phones being the first of course) is knowing when a phone will stop ringing. He can’t very well walk back to his desk while the ringer is still sounding. People will expect him to answer it! Answering phones is not a part of his plan. So he waits. Tingly fingers, numb thumbs, off to the bathroom, and then wait. And he will wait for a while. Over the years he’s found that most phones will ring, on average, for about one minute and forty-five seconds before defaulting the caller to voicemail, at which point he can safely return to his desk. This minute and change feel a lot longer when you are counting each second out loud (quietly!) to yourself in a five-foot by three-foot bathroom stall, pants around your ankles, pretending your best to be an overly-active overactive bathroom user.
Most friends he tells never fully believe him. Of course, he can demonstrate his prescience pretty easily and without fail, but even then, most will refuse to do something as simple as believe him. After disbelief, the response he gets most often is one of suggestion. Everybody thinks they’re so clever. ‘You should use this power for good. You should be, like, one of those nine-one-one telephone operators’. They all say this as if they’re the only ones to suggest such a thing.
First, what good would that do? He wouldn’t be able to predict crime or report it any earlier. The phone would still have to ring for him to answer it and receive the sensitive emergency information needed to dispatch responders. Second, and far more important, is that the constant incoming calls would be torture for him! ‘Hello’s upon countless ‘hello’s and ‘good days’ and ‘how do you do’s! No way is that going to happen. Nuh-uh! Big time no good!
His walk back from the bathroom is a leisurely one. He has no reason to speed. The place he’s going to is not a place he wants to be. He never stops to talk to anyone along the way back though. There are uncontrollable ‘hello’s there too.
He does, however, stop to tie his shoes often, and sometimes has to even stand and double back to the bathroom if he feels his fingers begin to go numb to avoid the rare ‘double-caller’. He feigns sickness every time this sort of situation rears its ugly head. Everyone in the office thinks he suffers from an overactive bladder problem. They talk about it behind his back often. Daily. They think it’s a serious illness. But he doesn’t have a serious illness or an overly active overactive bladder problem. He just knows something they don’t: he knows when a landline telephone is about to ring.