Telephonophobia

I have always believed that in the course of our daily lives we accomplish many tasks which before we have accomplished them, look insurmountable. These tasks could be taking a bath (for some) or attending labs and lectures (for most) but for me it is talking on the telephone. I do not find every call a grueling experience but some I positively abhor. I am not afraid of talking on the phone but of running out of things to talk about. Now some people can talk about anything and everything on the phone but I am always scared to death of boring the poor guy on the other side. I do not understand how some people can talk about the latest way they have found of tying their shoe laces or the latest litter of the bitch “just” three houses away. They jump from one “exhilarating” experience to another without giving a damn about the worth of the other poor guy’s time.

Take for example the call I recently made to an old friend of mine. It took us about 3 minutes to exchange the latest in our lives and then we had practically run out of any sensible comments. On occasions such as these the last resort left to us non believers in the art of telephony is to come up with a drab statement like “So, what else is new?”. I regard this sentence to be a sort of signal which means that it is time for the conversation to end. My friend however belonged to an opposite school of thought. From the rest of his speech I could only gather that he understood my “signal” to mean that he had my full attention and I was ready to hear all about his daily rigmarole. He proceeded to tell me in great detail about how he had forgotten his bus pass at home and had had to pay for his ticket, how his girl friend had soundly lambasted him for such forgetfulness and how she was always nagging him about something or the other. By the end of it all I was flabbergasted. He went on and on for 12 minutes at least. Now it was my turn to speak, but I had already exhausted my quota of topics. I was tongue tied and on the phone one’s tongue is pretty much all one has so I was rather embarrassed. After such a long diatribe I could not even go back to my standard question and anyways it had produced highly unsatisfactory results. With great caution I began to recount a small incident about my encounter with a certain professor. Though I knew that the incident was hardly what one terms amusing, I had at least hoped that its simplicity would help conclude the discussion. The outcome was however most bewildering. My friend laughed at all the wrong points in my story and at the end of it started describing a similar encounter of his own. In the end I just managed to get rid of him by saying that I had to go for dinner otherwise who knows how long he would have gone on for.

One of my close friends at IITG has suddenly switched from my camp to the other one. He was like me a simpleton and an amateur in this stupid art. In fact he was even worse than I am. A telephone call from a childhood sweetheart and three months later he has now become a pro. In the initial stages his girlfriend was always complaining that he hardly said anything and now he regularly talks for four and a half hours on the trot and his monthly bill is always four figured. God knows what he talks about daily for so long but he was once heard describing how he fancied ripping someone’s finger nails off and that too in gory detail!!!