Who’s Calling

Posted on April 6, 2013 under Storytelling with 2 comments

The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell,  spent his summers  a few hours down the road from here in the scenic town of Baddeck.  He named his summer property Beinn Bhreagh.  Roughly translated these Gaelic words mean “my cell phone contract is indecipherable”.  My office is in the old telephone switchboard building and its owner has adorned the place with antique phones going back well over one hundred years.  The only thing missing is two old Campbell soup cans attached with a string. The advances with phone technology is quite staggering and now we carry our phones with us, take pictures with them; even pay bills with them. They are a wonder and a marvel when they are fully operational. Sometimes they become dysfunctional and temperamental like a teenager.

When I taught school in Alberta in the ‘70’s, I had the pleasure of living with five other transplanted Maritimers for the better part of three months… in a two bedroom apartment.  I arranged for telephone service and at the end of the first month, the phone bill arrived. It was eleven pages long and the total was in excess of $1100. Long distance love is costly.

My sister does shift work and the shifts are irregular and unpredictable, something akin to her phone service lately. For a few days, incoming and outgoing calls were problematic to say the least. When the phone was working, the receiver was filled with static. It was something like a guy waking up after a big night with the boys and having his wife give him his chore list, while screaming in his ear. With a mind seemingly of its own, the phone would ring at all hours of the day and night.

A few nights ago after a particularly long day shift, she retired early . Occasionally she will get a call late in the evening to work the next morning. The phone rang. No one there. This continued unabated on the hour until 4:00 a.m. Now delirious with fatigue, the phone rings  again and it is the good folks at 911. They are responding to her call that she purportedly made a few minutes ago. They want to confirm her address and ask her the nature of her distress. The obvious answer would have been that her telephone service provider was driving her insane. She chose the high road and suggested politely that she had not called 911. Unless, of course, her cat had hit the speed dial on the phone.

She hung up and crawled back into bed waiting for this nightmare to be over. As she was drifting off to sleep, she thought she heard sirens in the offing. The sound became more pronounced and seconds later lights from the ER vehicle splattered off her bedroom wall. This was followed by feverish pounding on her front door.

Alexander Graham Bell also invented the metal detector which will come in handy as hospital officials try and locate phone parts imbedded in the skulls of the first responders.

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