Lee Pitts: I’ll Let You Go Now

I'm the last person in America who doesn't own a cell phone so when your phone doesn't ring, it's me. I have a good reason for being a telephonicphobiac… I'm a writer and I think it was Anonymous who said, "For a writer all phone calls are obscene." Mark Twain hated the phone and Ambrose Bierce called it "the invention of the devil." And keep in mind, William Shakespeare produced his best stuff before there was such a thing. Had he lived after phones were invented instead of asking, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo," he would have written the more monotonous, "Hello, is Romeo there?"

It's not just writers who have hated phones. After President Rutherford B. Hayes got off the phone to Alexander Graham Bell in one of the first phone calls the President asked, "Who would ever want one?" Within two minutes I'll bet old man Rutherford said to Alex, "I'll let you go now," which is the polite way of getting off the phone with someone you never wanted to talk to in the first place. Speaking of Bell, in his later years the inventor removed all the phones from his home because he found them so annoying.

The phone calls I hate the most are the ones from India, Pakistan and Nigeria where some telemarketer who has the worst job in the world tries to sell poor me solar panels or Medicare insurance, or tries to make me think the IRS is going to swoop down and take everything I own if I don't Fed Ex them all my money overnight. And I'm really sorry, but to all those poor Nigerian Princes who just need me to loan them half a million for a few days, the answer is still, "NO!"

Trust me, mine is the WRONG NUMBER!

Land lines were bad enough, now we have cell phones so people can annoy you any time, anywhere. Since when did it become the nation's favorite pastime to go to the grocery store and yell obliviously on your cell phone while clogging up the aisles? And why, in a 65,000 square foot store do you do it while standing right in front of my favorite Skinny Cow fudge bars? Go camp in front of the chunks of tofu that no one is trying to buy.

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