Sandi Kahn Shelton

So day before yesterday I dropped the receiver of the kitchen phone onto the floor. It bounced one little teeny bounce against the linoleum, and I picked it right up…and although it showed no outward signs of trauma, it has refused to work ever again.

No dial tone. Nothing.

Now I don’t get this. Phones used to be tough. They were made of hard substances. Why, they were even throwable in a passionate argument. You could hurl a phone across the room at your boyfriend, have it hit the wall, make a big hole and shatter a painting there, careen off the coffee table, and then still call your friends on it later to discuss whether you should break up with the guy. Clearly, American phone technology is not going in a good direction.

But what is truly bad about the death of my kitchen phone is that it means that I have to once again go into a phone store and explain to some fourteen-year old clerk that, no, I don’t want a phone that can do Fantastic Tricks, like take pictures and remember numbers and summon the internet and, worse, live off of its cradle. I don’t even know what all phones can do these days–and tell me this, is there anything that can make a person feel older than trying to talk to a young person about telephones? A young person who is shaking his head and looking at you pityingly because you truly do not GET IT that phones are not meant just for talking on anymore? 

What I need–and I feel I’ve tried numerous times to explain this to a disbelieving adolescent–is simply a kitchen phone that will stay on the wall, a phone that I can add a 50-foot cord onto so that I can drag the receiver over to the couch and lie among the pillows, sipping tea while I talk. That is all. I have plenty of portable phones (two, actually) that are now in various locations throughout the house, beeping sadly that they need to return to the Mother Ship, which I currently believe exists somewhere in the spare bedroom underneath a pile of college-student laundry. These phones, adventurous and free-ranging as they are, not only have to be tracked down for every telephone call, but then they make the caller sound as if he has just gone into a far-away cave in Afghanistan and then taken a huge bite of someone’s down comforter before dialing. 

So yesterday, feeling brave and bold and ready to strike out on my own with this phone-buying business, I marched into my local little hardware store, which is the kind of place where you can still find Old Guys Who Know Stuff sitting around chatting over the advantages of copper pipes, and I directed myself straight to the phone section. No youths showed up to explain to me the virtues of new phones. And unlike those huge box stores, this store had exactly two phones to choose from: one that sticks to the wall and stays there, and one that is portable and probably has a down comforter balled up inside its voice apparatus.

I bought the old-fashioned wall one, proudly, spending all of $7.99, and then I came home and hooked it up to all the little wires and stuck it to the wall.

And…well, it will not work.

It turns out that I’m a little less old-fashioned and unpicky than I thought. This poor old phone is so untalented that it doesn’t have a plug for the caller I.D. screen which is mounted just underneath it. The phone rings, and the caller I.D. screen just shrugs its shoulders and says, “Don’t look at me. I don’t know who’s calling. This phone doesn’t link to me.”

Also, its cord is stuck into it permanently, so that I can’t replace it with my luxurious 50-foot variety for walking around the premises.

So now I have to go back, and this task seems even harder than before. I need, I will explain, a stick-on-the-wall, land-line phone, with a caller ID hookup, and a removable cord. It doesn’t need memory, it doesn’t need redial, it doesn’t need to know how to mix a martini or show a DVD.

Just a phone–and it would be nice if it wouldn’t plunge, suicide-style, to the kitchen floor.

Yep.

That’s what you think it is: the sound of a computer deciding never to work again, shutting downs its RAMs and its BIOS, and fading to black.

It’s also the sound a computer makes when a person–okay, a hysterical person–keeps punching the ON button over and over again, saying, “No, no, no! One more chance! Just let me have my address book! Just let me have my photos! My email addresses! My Word documents! Oh, my God, please, not the novel, too!”

Okay, so I ignored some of the signs that we weren’t doing well together–like the times I would log on and it would show me a little screen that said, “Anticipated failure. Back up everything, you idiot.”

It even used to go to sleep without warning when I was typing, and then would pop up a little screen that asked very politely if I would like to report its misbehavior to Microsoft. Sometimes, if I was very annoyed, I would say, “Sure, buddy, let’s do it. Let’s just tell Microsoft about your crimes.” And then Microsoft would send me a message back, essentially agreeing with me that this was a stupid computer, entirely incorrigible, and that Microsoft itself couldn’t think of a thing to do to make it act better. You could practically hear the sigh in its report: “We raised it right, we taught it better than this, but–well, what are we supposed to do about it now? It has issues.”

Issues, sure, but I guess I didn’t really think it was going to just DIE on me.

Okay, so this was days ago, and the dust has settled some. I can at least talk about it now. I had to put aside my mourning and my anger and go out and buy myself a new computer, of course. This new one is shiny and has more of everything than the old one had, lots and lots of initials and bigger numbers.  It even has a little video camera. I can watch myself type if I am ever feeling truly masochistic.

But here’s the best thing. When I turned it on for the first time and checked my email, there was a wonderfully comforting thing: there was my novel just waiting for me. Blinking at me.

Yes, I had emailed it to myself in a fit of good sense the day before the computer actually died.

I think it’s kind of interesting, actually, that everything else is gone, except the very thing that I’m supposed to be devoting my every moment to.

Almost as if…well, not to get too crazy about this, but it’s as if something is saying, GET TO WORK.

I am sensing that my possessions are fomenting a revolt.

My laptop has suddenly gotten so sloooooow that you can practically hear the pixels lining themselves up and arguing about who has to appear on the screen first. Now when you click on a file you’d like to read, you have time to go take a bath, make a cup of tea, and call a friend before it actually displays anything.

The coffee maker, always a worry-free device, yesterday decided to spew coffee and hot water all over the counter instead of having it drip into the cup.

The stereo has decided that it will never again play ”Santa Baby” by Madonna. That’s it. It just shuts itself completely down whenever that song comes up in the rotation. This would not particularly bother me becuase within the next few days we will put the Christmas records away, and the bad attitude of “Santa Baby” won’t be troubling the stereo anymore. But I get the feeling that this kind of censorship is a slippery slope. What if it stops playing Eva Cassidy? And what if one day it won’t play the alto flutes I love to listen to when I’m writing?

And now the car, not to be outdone, is making a disturbing, rattly, vrooming noise when you press the gas pedal to anything over 55 mph–and let’s face it, 55 is not even a barely survivable speed on I-95. You have to go at least 70 just to keep the guy behind you from coming right up the rear bumper and into your back seat.

This reminds me of an old Lenny Bruce routine when he talked about his possessions getting so out of hand that he was forced to call them in for a meeting in the living room. I have always subscribed to the theory that possessions should be kept in ignorance of each other as much as possible. You don’t want them to get into a pissing match when it comes to breakdowns. I’ve always felt that if the car hears that the coffee maker is grabbing attention by throwing hot water all over the place, the car will gleefully release its radiator fluid the next time you’re resting at a red light.

So I am trying not to freak out about all these threatened breakdowns. Maybe give them all a little rest and some nice talk, praise them for their jobs well done over the past year–and hope for the best.

Here I go: What a great laptop computer you are! You have been so fast for the two years that I’ve known you, and I just know that you’re going to keep lasting forever and ev…