Keven Smith

Frustration waits on the other line

ood flick the other night, huh?" I ask Mary Ann (not her real name).
"Oh, sure. Anything with Chris Farley," Mary Ann responds.
"Yep, Farley's a genius. Hey, did you ever see that Saturday Night Live skit with the..." Beep.
"Oops. I've got another call, Kev. Can you hold on a sec?" Mary Ann interrupts.
You see, I was dating a girl who had call waiting.
Twenty seconds later, Mary Ann comes back on the line.
"I'm sorry. This guy from my chem class wanted to know when the next lab is due. Anyway, what were you saying?"
"Oh, yeah," I smile. "There was that one skit where Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze were auditioning to be Chippendale dancers, right?"
"Hmm. I missed that one," Mary Ann says.
"Well, they had the two of them up on stage, dancing around like Chippendales. You know, the thrusting and flexing. Then they took off their shirts..." Beep.
"Oh, I'm sorry Kev. That's the other line again." A click, and then silence.
This one takes about half a minute.
"Sorry again. That was one of my friends from upstairs. A bunch of us are supposed to hang out later tonight," Mary Ann says.
"Cool," I reply flatly.
"You were in the middle of a story?"
"Yeah, yeah," I respond, racking my brain. "Oh, yeah. So they're up there and they're ... doing all the moves... OK, so the judges are making their decision, and Farley and Swayze are in the dressing room, and each one thinks the other guy totally got the gig. Well, the funniest thing is when the judges are announcing their decision, and they're like, `Barney, if your body weren't so bad, we feel that...'" Beep.
"Kev, that sounds like the other line again. I'd better get it."
"That's OK. I guess you sort of had to see the skit anyway."
"Wait a minute--it could be your phone that has the other call coming in," Mary Ann suggests.
"That's impossible," I reply through clenched teeth. "I don't even have call waiting."
It all began with the answering machine. That dependable little box raised some eyebrows in its first years of existence. But we as a society have grown comfortable with the notion of talking to a machine. In fact, we're often alarmed when someone picks up the phone. "Oh, I was expecting the machine," we explain, flustered.
Unfortunately, a panel of phone company guys decided that the answering machine would not suffice; Americans needed to be given a way to interrupt each others' calls at random. They designed this feature for the constantly preoccupied and named it call waiting.
Despite their good intentions, the phone company people had forever wrecked American phone etiquette.
Call waiting, the bastard cousin of the answering machine, is the very worst of our modern "conveniences." Whereas the answering machine sits patiently and takes your calls when you don't want to be bothered, call waiting bothers you while you are on the phone. It barges in with a litany of clicks, beeps or chirps. You try to ignore the disturbance, out of politeness to your current caller, but the beeps only continue as the second caller waits for acknowledgment.
So you give in and take the second call. You diplomatically tell the new guy that you will call him back shortly. He feels shunned, and the first caller gets restless. Sometimes, though, the second caller is calling long distance, and then you have to go back to the first caller and tell her, with carefully manufactured sympathy, that you must leave her for this newer, more pertinent caller.
This is precisely what happened to me on Mary Ann's ninth incoming call: Mommy and Daddy. She returned for a moment, apologized, and promised to call me back. This seemed reasonable. She had only been out with me a couple times, whereas she had known her parents for nearly 20 years.
But I began to realize that Mary Ann's busy phone line was becoming a turn-off. Clicks and beeps are anything but romantic.
I grant that this was an extreme case. Mary Ann was a fellow undergraduate student in Philadelphia. We students attach a sense of urgency to every phone call, even if a social engagement is the only thing at stake.
Even in moderation, though, call waiting is far too intrusive to be of any use. Whether I am on the line with a bosom friend or a telemarketer, I'd like to speak at my leisure. No disturbance is so important that it can't wait a few more minutes.
If there has been a death in my family, my relative will still be dead in 10 or 20 minutes. Let me finish my call before I get the bad news. After all, I'm not a mortician.
Ironically, the USC telephone system has sentenced me to a year of call waiting. Neither I nor my roommate was given the option of living without this modern "convenience." But I routinely ignore the intrusive beeps. And I suggest that others do the same.
After all, there is a better way to handle a busy line. I've heard about a voice mail system that allows callers to receive messages while they're on the line. This service isn't available through USC's telephone services, but they ought to investigate it. I would gladly pay a little extra each month to have uninterrupted phone calls and a built-in receptionist.
Heck, this service sounds so much better than call waiting that I might even call Mary Ann in Philadelphia and tell her about it.
Nah, maybe not.

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Keven Smith is a graduate student in the School of Music.