Many years ago, My Dad the electrical engineer, decided to outsmart the cable company by wiring the entire house for cable and hooking up every single TV we owned. At some point way back before The Day it was apparently really "in" to have more than one TV. I mean, it must have been some kind of big deal. So My Dad, not being one to do things in a small way, put a TV in every room except the bathrooms. Keep in mind that we didn't have a small house either. It was a 2-story 5 bedroom, den, living room, dining room house. And we had TVs in all of those rooms (which pissed Mom off royally since we'd watch TV while eating supper in the dining room - again, some sort of ancient taboo.)
Dad, being an engineer, was very proud of his accomplishment. Mom, not being an engineer, was very pissed off that he had run the cables for all of this right along the top of the walls just beneath the ceilings, big black ugly cables which went through little holes he had punched in every wall.
Yeah, Mom was ecstatic.
Anyway, many years later My Father discovered the cheap-skate joys of Garage Saling. Woo hoo! He'd preach to me about how I needed to go to garage sales because you could get all kinds of good crap for cheap.
And then he discovered the church "rummage" sale. Oh hell.
Dad came home one day with a bunch of old telephones. And when I say old I mean this
I shit you not. This was the phone I ended up with in my room. He installed the wall version in the den. It is still being used there to this day.
Naturally, along with all of these new phones came the need for new phone wiring to be run to all of the rooms that weren't already wired to have a telephone. This meant more holes and more wires coming through the walls. And this naturally thrilled My Mother to death.
My Father, luckily for me, never cared much about the novelty of the old phones he'd installed. To him they were normal since he grew up with them. I say luckily for me because something bad happened.
I don't remember who I was talking to or trying to call. I think I had made some kind of call to a business or something and they wanted me to press "1" to continue or something (today "1" is to speak English.) Naturally I couldn't press anything and so, being My Mother's Son, I got mad and slammed down the receiver really hard.
It broke and the mouthpiece fell out onto the table.
You can't slam down a Bakelite phone that is 50 years old. It just can't take it. Now, you can bash somebody's head in with the damned thing and it won't even scratch the phone, but you can't slam down the receiver like I'd done.
So now I had a broken antique phone that had been really cool and was now determined to prove to me that it was invented way before the age of Superglue. Yes, by God, I tried. I glued it and I taped it and I wrapped it up with everything I could think of, but eventually the pieces would fall out and the mouthpiece would fall to the floor, usually while I was talking to a girl, who would hear something along these lines, "so you wanna go ... oh shit ... RUMBLE RUMBLE CLUNK RATTLE KKKKKKKKKKK ... OK, I'm back. Sorry about that."
So now I had a broken antique phone that had been really cool and was now determined to prove to me that it was invented way before the age of Superglue. Yes, by God, I tried. I glued it and I taped it and I wrapped it up with everything I could think of, but eventually the pieces would fall out and the mouthpiece would fall to the floor, usually while I was talking to a girl, who would hear something along these lines, "so you wanna go ... oh shit ... RUMBLE RUMBLE CLUNK RATTLE KKKKKKKKKKK ... OK, I'm back. Sorry about that."
Yeah, very impressive with the ladies.
Getting back to the problem of the ruined phone, I decided to try to escape from this predicament. I bought a pushbutton flip-phone (my friend from high school, John Onder, showed me the world's first flip-phone back in the 9th grade. His father was an engineer for Motorola and had invented it.) I set the switch to pulse or whatever and then tried to hide the ruined antique phone. But this thing was a monster. There weren't any good places in my room to put it. Eventually I ended up sneaking it out back, to My Father's workshop. I found a big wooden crate where he had a whole bunch of telephones in various states of disassembly. I tried to bury it in there.
One fateful day My Father caught me talking on the flip-phone. "Where's the phone I put in?"
"Huh, oh, I switched it out with this new phone. This one can do tone dialing which I need sometimes. I put the old one outside in the building."
"Oh, OK," he said and then left.
I thought I had solved my problem, but here is the catch. That was 20 years ago and that old broken telephone is still out in that crate which is still in My Father's workshop behind the house and one day I know he's going to find it. And he's going to remember me suddenly not using it anymore. And he's going to know that I broke it. And old as he is I'm going to catch hell. I think about this every time I go home to visit them. I've been avoiding going out to his workshop ever since, in the fear that he'll come out there to see what I'm doing and just happen to find the phone at that very moment. And I'll be trapped out there in that old dusty building with him and that phone.
One of these days while I'm visiting I need to sneak out there at about 2 a.m. and steal it. I found a guy on the internet who fixes those old phones. I could get it fixed and put it back. Maybe he'd never notice. And finally, after all of these years, I'd be off the hook.
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