The Bad News Notification Device

The damned telephone.
It’s handed me nothing but misery, tragedy and inopportune bits of devastation throughout my life.

In ancient eras the phone was but a cacophonous bell-ringing head-rattling monstrosity motored by the purringness of the clickety-click-click of the rotary dial. You couldn’t dial a phone number any quicker than the stupid round dialer was capable of spinning. Purrclickety-purrclick-purrclick…

See, there were limits then. Unlike now…phones are unbridled high-tech masturbatory mega-toys and they’ll happily dial even to your voice’s commands now. Hands free, phone numbers directed with the flow of silent digital airborne instructions.

As I was stating, the telephone is bad news.

It started in 1973 one afternoon when our kitchen telephone rang. The phone was a permanent immutable household fixture affixed to the wall and tethered by the curly-wurly plastic spiral cord. The telephone’s “ring” was really a ring. It was a loud, fire-station decibel RING, damnit. That shit could knock the crust out of your ears. Phones knew how to ring and there was nowhere in the house you could flee its invasive audible cries. Nowhere. That tolling bell, it was either waking the dead or busting down the door, exposing your prone figure while you cowered in the corner seeking to escape its wrath. But there was no escaping that brassy alarm!

In 1973, the kitchen phone rang.
Loudly.
Which makes it even more disquieting…

My mother answered and since I was very young, my memory is hazy. After holding the phone to her ear for a few seconds, she burst into uncontrollable sobs of grief. Very bad news, the worst news. Two of my young cousins, 9 and 10, right around my age, were sleeping in the cab of a big rig my uncle was driving back east during the summer, and along a road in Indiana the axle broke and the truck jackknifed on a bridge and caught fire. The fire quickly engulfed the big rig and my cousins burned to death, trapped in the cab. My uncle was disfigured for life by the flames.

That was the call; that was what the bellicose ringing needed to tell us.
The tone was set for all time.

Evil phones. If it wasn’t the loud bells and agonizing rotary bullshit, it was the subdued peaceful ringing of later models and the soothing (and swifter) push-button replacement of the rotary dial. The buttons gridded on a keypad in which each button, or number, was accompanied, when pressed, by a musical note that tonally chirped back in your ear. The “1″ sounded completely different from the “3″ which in turn, sounded different than the “8.” The musically adept (to be very generous and kind) had the capability to string together a series of button-pushes in order to create a simple melody; actually, a really awful sounding MIDI-quality concert. Nevertheless, bad news still flourished at the hands of the new generation of phones. Death. Destruction. Illness. Pain. The phone excelled at shrieking misery in our ears.

In time, the telephone’s ringing began to elicit a Pavlovian response from me. Whenever it rang at odd hours or unexpectedly, my first instinct was to reach for a tissue box or dash to the closet in order to dig out a clean black suit. The phone’s ringing was our official Grim Reaper anthem.

Cell phones and their technological serenity and indifference didn’t change the landscape.
Still, the misery visited, courtesy of radio waves.
Still, the death and the despair.
The gift of misery. Carried on the wings of electromagnetic transmissions and alerted within the customizable and individualistic (but really not) chime of an electronically generated custom ring.
I wasn’t a kid anymore. Now the telephone was the scene of arguments, disagreements, bad tidings. I broke up via the telephone a few times. I even had a DMV hearing via cell phone wizardry in which I pleaded to keep my driver’s license and still, to no avail, the phone failed me. And of course, the phone, still the standard bearer of death and misery. Some things never changed.

Bad fucking news.

The telephone is an artery of grievous horrors.
The telephone has always stood waiting, patiently, ready to bellow its harsh sentence at me. Sadistically, it savors the ability to rouse me from the slumber of complacent and happy existence; to smash my hopes with a sledgehammered dose of bad news.

And still, anxiously awaiting its clarion call.