adventures with caller id

I wrote this awhile ago. It's a little thing about call screening. Maybe it's funny. Maybe it isn't. What do you want from me? I'm tired. I've been going to class, doing homework, and trying to fixed screwed up hardware since 7 this morning and now Jeff is going to try to get me drunk and trick me into watching Spiceworld. I think I like the redhead the best. I hope we can turn the sound off and play some Who songs instead.

I have roommates. Lot's of them. Last I counted, there were 22 of them in all. I think they're breeding on the couch at night. It isn't good. I'm significantly outnumbered.

Anyway, one of them- He might be one of the new ones. I can't really tell for certain any more. Since the last move from run down grunge pit, to our new run down grunge pit in an isdn capable neigborhood a few miles away they all sorta meld together. He has developed a strange habit that I have not yet encountered.

He uses caller id.

But its more than that. He waits and lets the machine pick it up so he can here who is on the other end. Often he checks the little caller id box just to be sure. At first I thought it was just an excuse to be lazy. He didn't want to move from his comfy chair. But gradually I realized that this was not the case.

He waited by the phone. He would move to ear shot. he checked the little box. He wasn't to lazy to answer the phone, he was simply screening calls.

After the machine makes the little beep, one of the following things happens:

1. The caller hangs up
   At this point, my roommate makes some snide remark that loosely translates to "I Didn't want to talk to you either". And with some sort of huff or witicism, returns to his original task.
2. The caller is friend
   or obviously not calling for hin. My roommate answers the phone voice full of warmth and happiness. The caller is none the wiser.
3. The caller is foe.
   My roommates mutters something under his breath and wanders away. The caller leaves a message which is often even deleted moments after the caller disconnects.

These calls are like a tiny test. Not a coin toss, but a simple statement about person A, person B, and the relationship between them. And either the relationship is good, or bad. The phone is answered, or ignored.

I'm not different with my email. Sometimes I accept that my messages just won't get replied to. The person on the other end of the SMTP port just didn't have the time/interest/desire to reply to my message. I'll never know what they thought, except that it was probably negative.

And sometimes I just delete messages. Usually there is guilt associated with not answering an email. But I get hundreds of messages a day, and I have no choice to ignore some of them. 5 hours a day is enough time to allocate to replying to email. But I usually feel this guilt thing. I don't rarely feal that with a phone. I probably should. A phone is much more personal. The person is there on the other end of a wire, its not just some packets that zipped over the net and are consuming space in my inbox.

But this really isn't a problem these days. I never answer the phone. Besides that, nobody can get through. For some reason we have only one phone line now, and the ISDN still isn't working. So we're dialed out all the time. I don't think the electronic era has really advanced communication as much as I once did.