TEAM LAST CALL

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I want to do most of the time.

The term “cell phone,” as you may know, is derived from the Latin word “cellophonicus,” which experts loosely translate as “Hello? Can you hear me? Sorry, I’m driving through a tunnel!”

A few weeks ago I was standing in line at the grocery store when a woman came walking up behind me. She looked me right in the eyes and shouted, “Hi, baby. How are you?”

“Um,” I hesitated, “I’m not sure I know you. Have we met?”

“What are you wearing tonight?” she yelled.

“I’ll probably put on some sweatpants ... Are you sure we know each other?”

“Ha ha ha ha! Potatoes!”

“I’m sorry, but ...”

“Potatoes!”

Then I noticed the little wire running from her ear down to her hip, where a cell phone was clipped to her belt.

Thoroughly embarrassed, I spun around to the cashier. “Can you believe her?” I hissed. “That’s so rude!”

The cashier rolled her eyes, reached up to her head, and popped out her earpiece. “I’m sorry, I was on the phone. What were you saying?”

Cell phones are the new Spandex – they’re OK for your personal use around the house, but there are some ugly details of your life that the rest of us just don’t need to know about. Yet in restaurants, malls, office spaces, and theaters across the country, cell phone users insist on yelling, laughing, and blabbing the details of their morbidly boring private lives at top volume into their phones, completely unaware that they have become the giant pink flamingoes stuck in the front lawn of our society.

I have a few friends who are absolute cell phone junkies. Most of their lives are spent prancing around in desperate search of salvation in the form of cell phone reception. Should their antennae fail them for more than a few seconds, they drop to the floor and start flopping around like bug-eyed fish in the bottom of a boat. To lose reception, perchance to miss a call. To miss a call, perchance to have to wait five whole minutes for crucial information, such as how their friend just won $20 for snorting a gummy worm up his nose.

These are people who, given a choice between losing their cell phones or being eaten by a bear, would choose being eaten by the bear because maybe, just maybe, they’d still have good reception inside the bear.

If a cell phone and a baby fell into a river, they’d save the cell phone, because you can’t send text messages with a baby.

If a cell phone could fall in love, they’d marry it. They might anyway.

I was driving a friend to a concert the other week when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him hunched over his phone, slowly stroking its side like a puppy. The soft, blue glow of the screen reflected in his eyes, which were dilated like saucers. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth, and strands of drool stretched across his teeth like spider webs.

He coughed a few times, and then started whispering to himself. “My precious,” he hissed. “We loves you, my precious.”

“Dude, snap out of it!” I yelled, smacking him across the face.

“Gollum!” he coughed, jumping out the door and running into a cave, where he would spend the next 2,000 years worshipping his precious cell phone in the shadow.

These are the kind of people who make calls not because they have something to say, but because they still have 20 free weekend minutes to use. Rather than restrict their cell phone to emergencies (like getting eaten by a bear), my friends walk around with their itchy little trigger-fingers quivering on the speed dial button at all times, because you never know when you’ll come up with a real zinger.

“Thank you for calling Fly Magazine, this is Jeff.”

“Hey, Jeff – what do you call it when Plain people take classes in higher mathematics?”

“ ... What?”

“Trigonamish! Get it? Trigonomics and Amish? Trigonamish?”

“You’re an idiot.”

I personally have a cell phone plan that allows no more than 60 minutes of calling time a month. I refuse to pay my cell phone company $20 more a month just so my friends can call me every time they pick a booger that looks like Regis Philbin. And, given that bear attacks are not frequent in my part of the city, one would think that 60 minutes would be adequate for me.
Sadly, this is not the case, since my friends persist in calling my cell phone every five minutes, no matter how many times I threaten to list their names (Jeremy) and phone numbers (293-9772) in my columns. So instead, I end up paying my cell phone company $120 more a month for going 10 minutes over my limit.

I’ll be in the kitchen slaving away as usual – baking cookies for orphans – when I’m rudely interrupted by my cell phone ringing from the next room.
I throw down my oven mitts and go running into the living room.

“Hello?”

“I ... aff ... ot ilk ... ose!” says the caller.

“Hold on, I don’t have any reception!” I yell into the phone, running up the stairs to the balcony.

“OK, try again!” I pant, doubled over. “Hello? Are you there?”

“I ju ... ard ... out ... ose!” the caller replies.

“Hold on!” I gasp, galloping out into the doody minefield I call my backyard.

“Are you there? Hello? Hello?” I yell.

“Hi, Jeff,” says one of my friends.

“Hey. I’m in the middle of baking cookies for orphans. What do you need?”

“I was just laughing so hard that I shot milk out my nose!” he says.

“That’s crazy. So, what are you calling about?”

“Um ... I was just calling to tell you how I was just laughing so hard that I shot milk out of my nose.”

“You idiot.”

The bottom line is, these cell phone violators have got to be stopped. And it just so happens that I have the perfect solution, a plan that is sure to vanquish our dependency on cell phones once and for all. It’s so simple! All we have to do is ... oh, hold on, I have a call ...