The first time I can remember it was my senior year of undergrad. My phone (and its integrated answering machine) was on the main line at the Honors House because my roommate was the RA, and as such he had system voicemail which I couldn’t check. So my phone was downstairs, ringer cranked to the stars. It was impossible to miss.
And nothing good ever came of that phone ringing. The only person who ever called me was my new girlfriend, the one who replaced She Whose Name We Do Not Speak. And she had already gone off the rails. I should have had the sense to pack it in, but I didn’t, and one thing led to another and she was still my girlfriend even after I went off to grad school.
Grad school was electronic. Email off the VAX was our principal means of contact. So the ringing phone could only mean somebody I didn’t particularly want to talk to. And then grad school wasn’t there anymore, and in those first trying years out of school, the phone meant family I didn’t want to talk to, or bill collectors, or worse.
And over the course of these past nine years, everybody I want to talk to has long since figured out that the text message is the best way to reach me. And I’ve done the same. I don’t know if this is a product of the aversion or just feeds it, but there it is. Because I hate it. That’s half the reason I have one wacky ringtone after another, especially tailored to certain numbers so I’ll know whether it’s somebody I want to talk to. The regular ring of a phone is like an icepick down my spine, a shock of dismay and foreboding that I can’t abide having to deal with. And the more tense, or uneasy, or depressed, or anxious I am, the worse it gets.
Maybe that’s the price of having embraced the modern era. Email, SMS, picture messages, Twitter, Facebook, FaceTime, all manner of ways to reach the people I want reaching me. And so only the bad things come over the phone now.