Before I regale you all with my evening’s exploits, I’d like to begin with a hypothetical question. Suppose you’re on the phone with someone, when all of a sudden, the other end of the line goes silent. Do you:
A) Hang up and call him back,
B) Hang up and wait for him to call you back,
C) Hang up and go about your business, figuring he’ll either call you back or not, or
D) Decide that the only possible explanation is that he must have died, call everyone in his immediate and extended family and instruct them to bombard him with phone calls, leave him dozens of panicked voicemails, order his friends to call the police to investigate his apartment, and just generally cause as much hysteria and mayhem as possible?
As I was taking a walk this afternoon, I called my grandparents in upstate New York. I had barely gotten past “hello” when my cell phone’s battery died. As near as I’ve been able to reconstruct from the stories of various friends and family, here’s what happened next.
Grandpa, who picked up the phone, tells Grandma that I’m not saying anything, and that I had sounded “distracted” when he answered the phone. I have no idea why he thought this, but it’s just the tip of the fabricated iceberg; a mere portent of what is shortly to come. They hang up and try calling me back…no answer. Grandma decides that I must have gotten drunk and passed out (I drink all of once a month, I’ve never come close to passing out drunk in my life, and as far as I know neither of them has ever seen me have so much as a beer), and am in dire need of medical attention. Grandpa concludes that I must have been driving when I called, and was distracted by the onset of the near-fatal crash I had clearly gotten into.
Convinced of my impending doom, they attempt to call Roanoke emergency services by dialing 1-540-911. When this fails, they proceed to call my mother – who also lives in New York, but spent 18 years in Roanoke – and ask her for instructions on how best to do this. She advises them not to do it at all…and to instead contact the Virginia State Police, whose number she remembers from the time she had to call them because my grandparents were 15 minutes late of their ETA on the 12-hour trip from Plattsburgh to Roanoke. They ask her to place the call instead.
My mother tries the number she remembers, but she either misremembers it or it has changed (neither would surprise me, as the aforementioned incident was 10 years ago). In desperation, she tries my father’s number, which I have no clue how she knows; he does not answer. She then calls his work number, which I have still less idea how she knows, gets ahold of him, and tells him to call the police to look for me. My father, may the heavens bless him, is sane, and thus asked why exactly he might want to do this. He hears the story, and, trumped up though it was with theories of murder, conspiracy and drug-addled suicide, he deduces that the source of the problem was a dropped phone call. He assures my mother that he’ll call the authorities, which he does not, because he figures that my phone died. Pending further evidence of my demise, he goes back to work. I love my father dearly.
My grandparents, meanwhile, have gotten ahold of my best friend. He is not entirely convinced that I have expired, but promises my grandparents that he will call me, and check around with our mutual friends to see if any of them can confirm my continued existence. Dutiful soul that he is, he does this, but when talking to our other friends, he is somewhat less emphatic than I might have liked on the “he’s probably not really dead” part. Half of the people I know in Roanoke begin to send me frantic voicemails and text messages.
Around this time, I get home.
I plug my phone in to let it charge. It blinks at me, and happily chirps its announcement that I have new messages. I check the texts, and am promptly faced with fourteen hastily-typed inquiries as to the state of my vitality. I check my voicemail and find that I have ten new messages, all of which are from shaken-sounding family and friends demanding a call back to verify my extance.
I am…highly confused.
I’ll spare you the rest. Suffice it to say that I’ve spent the past few hours on the phone explaining to pretty much everyone I know that I am not dead, and being read the riot act by various family members for “scaring us like that”. I figured I should probably post here as well, lest I forget to contact someone who knows that I post here, who would then start an email campaign. Everyone seems to have calmed down after hearing the explanation…well, except for Mom, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
Damn, what a night. Lesson learned: don’t call the grandfolks unless the little blue bar is good and topped off. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go cook my dad a nice, big steak.
I mostly just wanted to vent.
