Installing a phone outlet in the basement should be cheap & easy (the phone wires probably come into the house down there already), costing you less than $20 for materials & 2-3 hours of your time. And your parents will probably appreciate it after you move out. Or go with the wireless phone option already mentioned. But doing something like this is a realistic way to prevent this from happening again, and possibly more productive than having a screaming fit on your little brother (not that he didn’t deserve it).
As far as your parents not saying anything to him, I’m betting that they did, but later & in private. (Probably something on the order of “that was the wrong thing to do. And your 8-months-pregnant sister is like a ticking time bomb right now; let’s try not to set her off again, OK?”) But at the time, it sounds like you were doing a fine & memorable job of letting him know that his actions were not acceptable. And I doubt that you parents had much chance to get a word in anyway!
In a few days, when you’ve both calmed down, do take him aside and explain how important phone calls are to adults searching for jobs. And you might tell him that unless Mr. W. gets his messages, so he can find a job, the both of you might end up staying in the house forever! That should give him a real incentive to get messages to you, without paying him $1 apiece!
I’ll stay out of the family problems, and stick with the technical side.
The easiest and cheapest solution, if there’s an unused phone jack anywhere in the house, is to get an inexpensive cordless phone (~$20), plug the base station into the unused jack, and once the cordless handset is charged up, take it down to the basement with you. Return it to its cradle for recharging every night, and retrieve it the next morning.
I admire your restraint: I or my parents would have tanned his hide. Get yourself a cordless phone. Otherwise Jess pretty much nailed it except that you should notapologise as that will confuse him.
Unless it was specifically explained to the kid that people would be calling, and that it was very important for you to be able to answer the phone / recieve messages, then you should have just brought it up with his (your) parents and asked them to deal with it.
Sister or not (and I say this as somone with a brother more than ten years younger), you are a guest in his home. Sister or not, you don’t get to rip him a new one. If I were your parents I wouldn’t have put the smackdown on him in front of you either, in fact I would have probably felt quite defensive of him. Family or not, you are no longer a daily part of the unit.
Yeah, my much younger brother has fucked stuff up for me with his brainfarts. When I lived there and interacted with him ever day I could say/do what I liked to him, now I am a guest in his home and I show him (most of) the respect I would show any guest.
I’m for no apology. Honestly. The humiliation of being ripped a new one in front of others will fade quickly, but that initial sting will make him think twice next time he wants to hang up on someone. I understand he’s shy and felt intimidated, but how do you think he’s ever going to get over that phase if he’s not challenged and made to face his fears or whatever they are? His parents need to be a little more like parents in my opinion.
I would guess this is a ten year old’s way of saying “I don’t like you in the house” (if I’ve successfully steered the course of pronouns,titles, and psedonyms in the OP)
In other words yelling and embarrassing him might have made things worse. Prepare for more passive aggressiveness!
I can see your point, but a 10-year-old needs to understand that hanging up on people, whether they are friends, business associates or potential employers, is just plain rude and unacceptable behavior. Explaining that Sis and her husband would be expecting calls is a little ridiculous; he obviously knows why they’re living there, doesn’t he? Does he hang up on calls for his parents?
I feel somewhat on the boys side. It sounds very much like big sister and Brother in law have not made good friends with him. As the adults it is up to the two of you to make sure your relationship with younger brother is a good and happy one. He needs telling off, for sure, and instucting not to do such a thing again, but flying off the handel in a rage caused nothing but harm. Appologise for getting so angry, explain how very important the phone calls were for you, kiss and make-up, and make sure that you and your husband become his friends.
Is it possible that you and Mr. Whatsit have given the impression that when you go down to that basement, you don’t wish to be disturbed for anything less than fire or terrorist attack? You said in the OP that your mom claims Brother is “intimidated” by you. Perhaps he truly believed that you wouldn’t appreciate interruption.
Maybe the kid thought it was a telemarketer? I remember when I was in my early teens, and whenever you got one of “those” calls (Number not available on caller ID, and a nice “business” man asking for your parents…), I would instinctively tell that person to not call and to go to hell (Hey, I was young and naive). There were a few cases in which the call actually mattered, like a call from a doctor or something. So yeah, maybe that’s what happened here?
There are things that I was too young for at 10 – I would not have been good at personnel managment, for example. But basic responsibility of the sort that can discharged with simple mechanical behavior? If I had not wanted to go down the stairs to get older sibling to the phone, I, at 10 would have said “She’s not able to come to the phone right now, would you like to try again later, or leave a message?” and then put the message at the sibling’s dinner-plate spot on the supper table.
Ten years old is not “really young”. I’ve known many 10 year olds who babysat, cooked supper for the family before parents came home from work, took care of customers who came to the store while storeowner-parent was out, etc.
Ten year olds who are treated with a combination of courtesy & respect and high expectations will generally have no difficulty. (In contrast, I’ve known plenty of 12, 37, and 50 year olds who couldn’t be counted on to take responsibility or exercise good judgment, most often people of whom not much was ever asked or expected).
I kind of doubt it, because every time we went downstairs during the time he was here sick, either I or MrWhatsit said something to the effect of, “We’ll be downstairs; don’t hesitate to come down and get us if you need anything.”
And, I have to point out that the only reason I have to think that he’s intimidated by us is that that’s the excuse Mom made for him when I talked to her about it. My brother has never given us the slightest intimation that he is intimidated, bothered, or otherwise upset by our presence here. If anything, I was under the impression that he kind of liked having us around, if only because MrWhatsit is always up for a rousing game of Risk or Stratego, and always makes his scrambled eggs and waffles in the morning. We’re not mean or rude to him, and we don’t have an antagonistic relationship. I am still baffled by the fact that he did such a rude thing to a caller on the phone – yeah, he’s only 10, but he has been taught appropriate phone manners and knows very well that it is not cool to hang up on a caller – and can only chalk it up to his having made a bad decision on the spur of the moment for some unfathomable 10-year-old reason. I would have really appreciated an apology, but I figure I soured the waters (is that a mixed metaphor?) enough by yelling at him publicly, so maybe we’ll just call it an even draw and leave it at that.
Thanks to everyone who gave us advice on setting up the phone. The problem is now taken care of, and we have an extension to the house phone installed and working in the downstairs basement, so missed calls are a vanishing small possibility now. My brother is feeling much better and is going back to school on Tuesday, and seems like he’s in a chipper mood and is not pissed off about the brouhaha at all. And, at this point, neither am I. I wish the whole thing hadn’t happened, but, I’m basically over it.