A TALE OF TWO PHONE CALLS

You might find it hard to believe in these days of multimedia communications that I spend very little time on the telephone. My mobile phone is just a work tool and my callers are usually from a circle of about four regular people and so it remains fairly shiny and pristine despite not being the most up-to-date of pieces of equipment. Otherwise, communications with Lesser Blogfordshire are performed using the medium of electronic mail (although personal messages are very rare), or the landline. Sometimes it is such a rare occurrence for our telephone to actually ring that it can come as a total shock and cause great astonishment when it does so and it can sometimes take a few moments for me to realise what is going on, because, apart from a few troubling calls about family matters, or yet another call centre making me an offer I find easy to refuse, it can sometimes go entire weeks and months between rings…

Actually, being as I am such an antisocial so-and-so, you might not actually find any of that very hard to believe at all, but I do occasionally allow myself the slightest of hopeful glimmers that I haven’t quite yet been completely consigned to the dustbin of history by everyone who’s ever met me, although it’s getting to be a bit touch-and-go nowadays.

I’ve always been particularly bad at telephone conversations anyway. Unless I’m in a “prepared” state of mind, I can very quickly find them getting out of my control, with me either coming across as so ridiculously pleased to hear from someone that I verbally gush with excitement and babble on nonsensically, or I get so intimidated by the silences coming from the other end that I become desperate to fill the gaps and it all rather rapidly turns into a bit of an embarrassing mess. Many is the time that I’ve hung up after a telephone conversation and truly, truly wished none of it had ever happened and that I hadn’t said a word, and I will spend the rest of the evening convinced that everyone I’ve ever met must think that I’m some kind of idiot and that whatever it was that I had been saying, I’ve just made a complete fool of myself.

“Why can’t I just shut up?” I find myself thinking. Frequently. But then I do that with these musings, too, so what do I know about anything?

So it was rather unusual that a few evenings ago the telephone rang three times in as many hours, and all the calls were for me, and two of them were people I know actually ringing up for a bit of a chat. The other one, by the way, and just in case you were wondering, was a location report on where the beloved needed picking up from later. Both of the other callers were the people who, if I do ever end up having “non-family” telephone conversations with someone, it’s one or the other of them that it is most likely to be. I hadn’t spoken to either of them in months so it’s quite a coincidence that they would both ring me on the very same evening, a few short hours apart, and find me in such different moods.

The first one took me completely by surprise and, on reflection, did not go too well. It didn’t help, I suppose, that my meal was busy bubbling away in the oven and so I was already feeling rather distracted when there was this unexpected development from out-of-the-blue. There’s a kind of “adrenaline rush” that surges through my mind when these conversations happen and the thoughts and ideas and possibilities and interconnectedness of all things tend to flood my brain in a way that I can suddenly feel like I’m drowning. This is dangerous territory because I can very quickly find myself spouting nonsense of the kind that will precisely cause the kind of mental self-recrimination that I mentioned earlier, and, sadly, this is how it turned out to be. All my fault, of course, but I am, even now, days later, still filled with the “this man’s an idiot” vibe I thought I was getting when the conversation ended. After all the years we’ve known each other there really are some topics that we should know better than to venture well clear of and steer a wide course around, but I waded right on in there regardless and now I feel like such a fool it’s ridiculous.

No wonder nobody wants to ring me up any more.

I’m pretty sure that it will all just be dismissed as another of my “rants” and that I was just being my usual stupid self, and I know that my much valued and very good friend is unlikely to finally give up on me just because I said a few strange things during one telephone conversation, but these things really do seem to trouble me. Perhaps, in the end, it might very well be the realisation that such things do trouble me so that will make people think twice before calling me up at all, so I should really play the matter down a bit and say that it doesn’t really matter all that much to me.

All of this just persuades me a tiny bit more of a much bigger picture in relationship to my dealings with people in the great big world. I sometimes really wish that people would listen to the words I’m saying rather than just hearing some noises I’m making, or, in the case of these blogs,  actually read them rather than making their mind up about what I’m saying before they’ve given me the chance to actually say it. I get this a lot, which is why I always feel somewhat misunderstood. In fact, in many ways, the blog is what I do instead of conversation, because I’m so very bad at doing conversation. I find that using this medium to put some of my more radical thoughts into some kind of order means that I can make my point without (hopefully) being too offensive and whilst having the opportunity to explain myself more thoroughly (if not, sadly, concisely). Of course, the fact that very few people actually read them with that kind of thoroughness does rather defeat the object, but at least I’m trying.

Anyway, an evening of brooding silence seemed to be in prospect, with me staring at the phone in self-disgust, having decided that I would probably be better off if I never spoke to anybody on a telephone ever again…

So, when the telephone rang again and it was my other old friend, I was so surprised that I didn’t really get the opportunity to worry myself about it, and we had a nice old chat and suddenly the art of telephony didn’t seem quite so bad any more.

I’m not a big believer in fate or coincidence or any of those sorts of things, tending, I suppose, to be something of a pragmatist, but I’m really so very happy that the second call happened because, with the amount of angst and self-loathing I was feeling after the first conversation, none of which was my friend’s fault I really must stress again, I was rapidly convincing myself to never, ever attempt to use the telephone as a means of social interactivity again, and so it was just nice to be able to have a little chat and come off the phone feeling happy.

Sometimes I do think that I have a tendency to over-analyse these things, but if you are  ever thinking of giving me a call, just beware. It’s a complete minefield.