POTTY TRAINING MY TELEPHONE

Remember when you potty trained your children?  There were two things they had to learn:  Where and When. And wasn’t it great when they finally learned?

It’s time to potty train my telephone.  You see, every time I go into the bathroom, my telephone rings.  Now it’s possible that either my bathroom or the telephone is bugged.  (The Russians did it!) I generally carry my phone around with me, either in my pocket or in my hot little hand.  There’s a coffee cup holder on the wall in that little private room that all RVs seem to have.  The holder is black and so is my phone.  If I’m in a hurry I plop the phone down on the coffee cup holder and then frequently forget it.  You know, black on black.

Then comes the search for the phone.  Did I leave it in the car?  Run out in the cold.  Nope. In some long forgotten jacket pocket?  No.  Aw, it’s ringing.  Now the surest way to locate a phone is in calling a friend to have them call you.  (Yah, sure.)

And after a frantic search to locate the ringing phone, nine times out of ten it’s going to be a scam call.  OOOH, I hate those robo calls. Have you had the one about your grandson who needs $10,000 to get out of jail in some foreign country?  Only problem is your grandson is only 5 years old. And if you ask “Which grandson?”  They say, “Your favorite one!”

Then there’s the one: “We’ve been trying to reach you, the warranty on your car has expired.” Well Dah! My car is older than Methuselah. It hasn’t had a warranty since the Civil War. (Talk about mixed metaphors.)

The real corker is “Quick! The Sheriff is coming to your house.  Quick! Call this number before he gets there.  We can stop him!”  Oh sure!  How dumb do they think we are?

Actually, the one that really gets the blue ribbon was a lengthy message from an old high school acquaintance.  She was having the “vacation from hell”; her purse had been stolen:  all her money, credit cards, etc. etc.  Could I please send $10,000 to this foreign country (which I’d never heard of). There were several problems with it.  First she was just an acquaintance, not a close friend.  Second, she was a prissy little missy who would never have said Hell. And the rest of the slang was unnatural, sounding like a foreigner trying to be hip. I got her phone number and called her:  she was cozily encouched before her fireplace in Northern Minnesota and had never been out of the states. Someone somewhere is still waiting for that $10,000.

Aw, telephones: can’t live with them and can’t live without them. But maybe, just maybe, a little potty training might help.  A schedule: time, place, function. And flush them away when they get too annoying!