Phone fear

I agree, these are all excellent reasons to hate talking on the phone, and I also hate talking on the phone for these reasons.

But I have a previous problem, I don't just hate talking on the phone, I hate answering the phone. The phone ringing can never be a good thing.

Very simply, if the phone rings, it means someone wants to talk to me, and since there are really only about two or at most three people living on planet earth who do not scare me, I mostly don't really ever want to be talked to.

The problem is that you can never predict what other people will say or do, and it's nearly always something bad. They want to yell at you for something you've done, or written, or they want you to do something that you don't want to do, like leave the house ... or talk on the phone.

And even if it's the best thing in the world, like they've made you king of a tiny European nation and the job comes with a really great free house and a butler, it is always going to be interrupting my train of thought, and I hate that.

Also if the phone rings, I have to open it up to see who it is, and if it's someone scary (nearly everyone) I am now stuck with a conundrum: do I wait until it finishes ringing (nine or ten rings) so the Scary Person on the phone will think I'm not home or maybe have left my phone somewhere, or some other innocuous thing and doesn't think I'm standing there wishing he/she hadn't phoned me; or do I just hang up by closing the phone, thereby cutting the rings off early and giving away that I am hanging up on him/her? The longer I sit there letting the phone ring, the worse I feel, but if I look and it's someone scary, I am afraid to make the Scary Person mad by hanging up.

It's kind of like squashing a spider. You don't actually want to squash the spider, because what if you miss or what if you squash it and it springs back to life and takes some kind of horrifying zombie-spider revenge?

I have a landline that I never use. The service came as a package with the internet, and my mobile phone is a separate thing that costs me about double the cost of the phone I never use. The phone itself is a treasure, a beautiful black 1937 bakelite art deco job, converted to a modern wall jack. It weighs about ten pounds. I know because I hauled it all the way here from Toronto.

Sometimes it rings, and I feel great about ignoring it because I've never, ever given out the number to anyone, so if it is ringing I know for sure it's telemarketers. Every now and then I make a call out on my beautiful antique landline just for the pleasure of dialing the wonderfully machined dial thing.

Someone once asked me, in a very forceful way, for my landline number, and I almost told him that the fact that he was demanding it was the reason I was certainly never, ever going to give it to him. A person like that might do anything. He might even phone you on your landline! I didn't tell him that though, because I thought it would make him mad and start yelling at me.

This fear of the ringing phone is very much like my more generalised fear of the outside world, and has to stem from my childhood, when I was in constant terror of being abandoned by my parents who never did anything but scream at each other. I never knew what horrifying disaster was coming, but I knew it was going to be bad. I remember I used to hide in a cabinet when they were going at it. Then, when they actually did abandon me, (several times between seven and 15) I guess I figured that the thing you fear the most is actually the thing that is most likely to happen, because it did.

It's subsided in recent years, like most of my general fears. I guess just having been functional as a grownup for a couple of decades will do this. (It's really awful being young, thank God it doesn't last forever). I used to jump whenever the phone rang, and just stare at it like a bird at a snake, until it stopped making that horrible noise. Caller ID helped a little, but it still makes me jump still if it shows a Rome number the phone doesn't recognise because for a couple of years, that meant a doctor was calling me, which was always bad news. Really bad.

In general, I think the phone was a bad idea. I wish we could have moved straight from letters to the internet. Which I like a lot. But probably for bad reasons.



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