If Your Cell Don’t Ring, It’s Me: Telephones

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“From the appearance of things on the Clemson campus, it seems that about half the student body is on the phone at any given time while the other half is wondering why no one ever calls. For all those on the phone or thumbing away at a text, what is the subject of this interminable conversation?” Skip Eisiminger

“The telephone tamed lightning.”—Anonymous, about 1880

“All phone calls are obscene.”—Karen Elizabeth Gordon, 2007

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—5/15/2013—Answering the Call of Nature at 3:00 a.m., a friend once urinated on his jangling telephone. I know the feeling, and the timing is not limited to the early hours of the morning, but then I have a number of issues with the phone, and apparently I’m not alone or the first.

When President Rutherford Hayes was introduced to the device in 1878, he said, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”

About 30 years earlier, Søren Kierkegaard feared that if something like the telephone were introduced, the “whole country would become mentally deranged.”

Well, it has been and we are.

Recently, our son was awakened from a sound slumber by someone who asked in all seriousness, “Are you home, uh, I mean are you awake?” The conversation deteriorated from there. The best evidence I’ve personally seen of our collective derangement was on the Clemson campus where the speed limit is 15 MPH. Deep in the sacred grove of academe, a student on her cell phone in an open convertible traveling at least twice the speed the law allows, crossed a double yellow line, sped through two crosswalks with pedestrians inside both, and then passed a stopped school bus . . . on a curve. Judging from her look of wind-tossed entitlement, she was oblivious of every law she’d broken.

Part of this young woman’s problem, I suspect, is the mixed message the state is sending. In December of 2009, Harper’s reported that while 27 states have forbidden driving while texting, 25 states offer traffic reports via Twitter. I know, you’re supposed to check the reports before you begin driving but, often, the traffic problem materializes after you leave your heated garage. Germany solved this dilemma several years ago by establishing a radio station that does nothing but report accidents and traffic jams on the Autobahns.

From the appearance of things on the Clemson campus, it seems that about half the student body is on the phone at any given time while the other half is wondering why no one ever calls. For all those on the phone or thumbing away at a text, what is the subject of this interminable conversation? Cartoonist Sidney Harris answered that with a pinch of hype. In a single panel, he has one cell phone user boarding a train saying, “I’m getting on the train.” Inside, another caller is saying, “I’m in the train.” Disembarking, a third caller is saying, “I’m getting off the train.” I can remember when a phone call, like the telegram, was a harbinger of death or great joy. Born in 1939, my German wife assures me that her family received one phone call in 20 years; the state lottery telephoned in 1950 to say her father had won a house.

Harris and I speak as the aural voyeurs the cell phone has made us. We’ve all had the uncomfortable experience of standing in line waiting to pay while the customer in front of us chatters merrily away, ignoring the clerk trying to check him out. Having inhaled my share of second-hand speech since the toxic cloud began forming in the 1980s, I’m confident that most phone conversations are as banal as Harris implies. This was confirmed several years ago as I strolled through Greenville’s Haywood Mall, killing time, waiting for my wife. As I passed the last pay-phone in America, it rang. I stopped, looked about, and it was obvious that the intended recipient was nowhere around because most everyone in sight was on a phone of her or his own. So, I answered the greasy, graffiti-tagged object with some misgivings, “Uh, hello.”

“Hi,” the caller said. “This is Billy—wanna talk?”

“Billy,” I said as my anxiety passed, “I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number.” The novelist Ann Patchett recently said that she often sets her novels in places like the Amazon interior so that people from her world cannot pan-handle aid from friends or the police. Referring to her characters, she told the Wall Street Journal, “I need for people to be cut off and find their own way.” The kid I spoke to who’d called the mall was just as bored as I was. We were both trying to find our way.

I guess what I’m saying is I hate being on a virtual leash. The first taste of it came about 30 years ago as I was preparing to go to graduation. The phone rang, and a woman crisply said, “Is this Dr. Sterling Eisiminger?”

“Yes,” I said nervously, because no one except the police or tax lawyers calls me “Sterling.”

“Please hold for Attorney John Doe.”

“Oh, no,” I thought. “What have I done now?” Two minutes that seemed like ten passed while I tried to recall any outstanding warrants. I was already late for graduation, but I didn’t dare hang up.

“Hello, Professor Eisiminger, this is attorney John Doe; you taught our daughter Jane this semester in a sophomore lit class; I’d like to know what grade you have given her?” I should have hung up right there. University grades are a confidential matter between student and teacher, but I was so relieved I wasn’t being sued that I went to get my grade book. This is just one reason I seldom answer the phone any more, especially since we bought one that permits call screening.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not an anarchist. My number is listed, and I have a landline phone with more features than a Rolex chronometer. Moreover, every time I fly into an airport where my ride is waiting in the cell-phone parking lot, I think, “Maybe I ought to get one of those things.” The closest I’ve come to purchasing one was after I heard a German friend Erika relate the following story.

Erika had told an American friend that her two adolescent girls could spend a few days in Karlsruhe with her on their European Grand Tour. The two teens, however, arrived at the Karlsruhe Bahnhof without their address book and one Euro between them. Undaunted, they called a friend in Paris, who called a friend in Tokyo, who called a friend in San Antonio, who called Erika in Karlsruhe. When she received the call that had been patched around the globe, she drove to the train station five minutes away to pick up her guests.

That’s the exception, however, that fails to prove any rule I’m aware of. The majority of my phone conversations start something like this: “Hi, Roxy, how are you?”

“Hi, Skip.”

“I’m fine; how are you?”

I suppose that if I’m ever in need of a flash mob, I’ll revisit the cell phone. For now, give me a keyboard, and you won’t hear me tripping over my tongue. I wasn’t around in 1922 when the nation observed a minute of silence following the death of Alexander Graham Bell, but I do miss the peace and privacy.

Note: The illustration (circa 1939) for this column was taken via Flickr and belongs to the Library of Congress photostream (18,540).