How to be a f*ckwit on the phone

The ring of my telephone strikes fear into my heart; how can I be sure that there isn’t a f*ckwit on the end of that line?

How to be a f*ckwit on the phone:

Don’t return calls.

Don’t respond to messages.

Don’t even listen to messages.

Don’t listen to messages till weeks or months later.

Have a phone message service operating on your land-line, unchecked for months while you are secretly away overseas on the trip of a lifetime.

Don’t check recorded messages for weeks or months, and still expect the caller to be interested when you finally call them back.

Don’t bother to write people’s phone numbers down when they give them to you. You can always call them later to ask.

Answer highly personal phone calls with your phone on speaker mode within earshot of a crowd of strangers or acquaintances, and don’t tell the caller.

Never do anything so ordinary as answering a phone when it rings: always return calls or messages at a time that is convenient to you, but which is probably not nearly as convenient to the other person who phoned you in the first place, who has three kids with ADHD bouncing off the walls, a toddler in the midst of toilet-training and a newborn baby with colic.

Expect others to communicate capably with you in your preferred mode of communication; call a semi-verbal autistic person just for a chat, ask a stutterer to keep it brief please, and tell a dyslexic to put it all in writing.

Get paid for being a f*ckwit on the phone; work in a call centre bothering members of the public in a faraway country at dinnertime to try to sell them stuff.

Run lots of telephones off one land-line, so that the sound of your voice is so quiet to callers as to be scarcely audible.

Use a defective cordless phone, so that the sound of your voice is so quiet to callers as to be scarcely audible.

Don’t get too hung up over minor details; what does it matter if you make a few wrong-number calls?

Make a wrong number call and then get a bit miffed when the other person doesn’t recognize your voice “It’s Sebastian calling!”

Leave your borderline retarded offspring unsupervised and bored at home for long periods of time, so that they can get on with their prank calls undisturbed.

Have three or more telephone numbers so that potential callers have to think “eeny meeny miney f*cking moe” when they try to decide how to try to contact you.

When a family member that you haven’t spoken to for months calls, ask them to get off your line as you are expecting an important call.

Expect the target of your phone call to be continually available to take calls at home on a land line, because she is a housewife and a mother.

Have an automated phone answering service operating that has no message recorded on it, leaving callers to wonder what the heck is going on as they waste the cost of a phone call.

Copyright Lili Marlene 2007