"Bad Habits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

They’ve Got Our Number

What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night. These people have been abducted by large publishing companies and placed in barbed-wire enclosures surrounded by armed men with attack dogs, and unless they sell 350 magazine subscriptions per day, they will not be fed. These people are desperate. They will say anything to get you to subscribe, and you cannot stop them merely by being rude:

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Barry?

ME: No, this is Adolf Hitler.

CALLER: Of course. My mistake. The reason I’m calling you at eleven-thirty at night, Mr. Hitler, is that I’m conducting a marketing survey, and ...

ME: Are you selling magazine subscriptions?

CALLER: Magazine subscriptions?

ME: Selling them? Ha ha. No. Certainly not. Not at all. No, this is just a plain old marketing survey. (Sound of dogs barking in the background.) If you’ll just answer a few questions, we’ll send you a million dollars.

ME: Well, what do you want to know?

CALLER: Well, I just want to ask you some questions about your household, such as how many people live there, and what their ages are, and what their incomes are, and whether any of them might be interested in subscribing to Redbook?

ME: I don’t want to subscribe to anything, you lying piece of slime.

CALLER: How about Time? Sports Illustrated? American Beet Farmer?

ME: I’m going to hang up.

CALLER: No! (The dogs get louder.) Please! You can have my daughter!

ME: (Click.)

The first telephone was invented in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell attached a battery to a crude electrical device and spoke into it. Everybody thought he was an idiot. He would have died in poverty if Thomas Edison hadn’t invented the second telephone several years later.

The first telephone systems were primitive “party lines,” where everybody could hear what everybody else was talking about. This was very confusing:

BERTHA: Emma? I’m calling to tell you I seen your boy Norbert shootin’ his musket at our goat again, and if you don’t—

CLEM: This ain’t Emma. This is Clem Johnson, and I got to reach Doc Henderson, because my wife Nell is all rigid and foaming at the mouth, and if she don’t snap out of it soon the roast is going to burn.

EMMA: Norbert don’t even own a musket. All he got is a bow and arrow, and he couldn’t hit a steam locomotive from six feet, what with his bad hand, which he got when your boy Percy bit it, and which is festerin’ pretty bad.

DOC HENDERSON: You better let me take a look at it.

BERTHA: The goat? Oh, he ain’t hurt that bad, Doc. He’s mostly just skittery on account of the musket fire.

CLEM: Now she’s startin’ to roll her eyes around. Looks like two hard-boiled eggs.

EMMA: What kind of roast is it?

DOC HENDERSON: If it’S just skittery, you should stroke it a bit and keep it in a dark place.

EMMA: Well, I ain’t no doctor, but I ain’t never heard of stroking a roast.

CLEM: Only dark place we got is the barn, and I’d be afraid to put Nell in there on account of she’d scare the chickens.

BERTHA: Chickens ain’t a roast, Clem; chickens is poultry. Take ‘em out of the oven when you can wiggle the drumstick.

EMMA: I told you already, Norbert don’t even own a musket.

CALLER: Hi. I’m conducting a marketing survey. Is Mr. Hitler at home?

CLEM: No, but I’ll take a year’s worth of American Beet Farmer if you got it.

The party-line system led to a lot of unnecessary confusion and death, so the phone company devised a system whereby you can talk to only one person at a time, although not necessarily the person you want. In fact, if you call any large company, you will never get to talk to the person you’re calling. Large companies employ people who are paid, on a commission basis, solely to put calls on hold. The only exception is department stores, where all calls are immediately routed to whichever clerk has the most people waiting in line for service.

But we should never complain about our telephone system. It is the most sophisticated system in the world, yet it is the easiest to use. For example, my twenty-month-old son, who cannot perform a simple act like eating a banana without getting much of it in his hair, is perfectly capable of direct-dialing Okinawa, and probably already has. In another year, he’ll be able to order his own magazine subscriptions.