After 25 minutes of:
- dialing your -8881 cell phone number, which, as I was so rudely reminded, simply hangs up on people after they dial, so one wonders (a) what good it is and (b) why you don't destroy it or cancel service or at least have a pleasant message including your forwarding number after so many months, and please don't tell me I'm the only person who ever encounters this problem with your old number;
rifling through seven or eight old cellphones, including not only my stash of stalwart Samsung R225s (which model, vintage ca. 2001, I still prefer because of the monochrome LCD and no-nonsense durability and which I jokingly refer to as "the world's last rotary-dial cellphone" and which includes the latest disabled unit, recently having succumbed to screen damage after this angry young drunk punk kid jumped on it with his Chuck Taylors and yet it works fine except for a cracked screen), and also my new stash of several technicolor Motorola BR50 cell phones which have built-in cameras and which I found in the company of my latest R225 in a recycle bin at a community center, but of course all are perfectly good, including batteries, except one, presumably disposed of only because people either didn't like the color or had to switch services or wanted to upgrade to some device that will distract them from the world even further with its action-packed, hypnotic glow;- patiently moving SIM cards and batteries among these units -- plugging, unplugging, powering up, testing for the right combination, waiting for several "phonebooks" to initialize (I use sarcastic quotes to emphasize my contempt for the name, see more on my disgust immediately below);
- flipping through each "phonebook" (how many do I own?) looking for the number that would work for you, because naturally there is no such thing as a serviceable Ithaca, New York telephone directory anymore, not even on the Web, at least for cell phones, but even if there was you'd probably unpublish yourself, but also because in all fairness I do have a phone number for you, on my current SIM card (of which it was you, incidentally, who once rather religiously, yea reverently, nay acolytically, pronounced that it is often referred to as "the soul" -- good grief -- of the cellular phone, Let Us Genuflect), but your newest number would not be on that SIM card because it's new, and the old one has always occupied the card space and the new one is not on the phone memory in my screen-crushed LCD but in fact on my penultimately newest R225, the one I
retrofitted last Christmas (probably because I had to call you), with a mini-phone jack for power since the Achilles heel of the R225 is its flimsy edge-connector power plug, which has an operating life of around 200 connection-disconnections
, and by the way I don't think I've ever before in my life had to use a microscope to dremel and solder; - finally finding the magic suffix -3823 that I was looking for, which would connect me to you, and making a mental note to actually transfer this number to the SIM card and forever obliterate the old, and calling you immediately (on the good phone, of course), only to be greeted by, not you, but a recorded version of you, telling me to kiss off because you were asleep or driving or otherwise too indisposed to accept a well-wishing telephone call.
Fuck you.
Even if it isn't exactly your fault.
Oh, yes, and Happy Birthday.
