THE PHONE

One day I may be forced to either write a book about my phone frustrations or get therapy.

It doesn’t help that my mother-in-law is always yapping, but in the nicest possible way, about the fact that we can’t find the phones.

“I have never seen a household that has more problems with the phones than yours.”

I am well aware that by ‘yours’, she means mine. Somehow, her little Ricky is absolved from ALL implications of blame and I am the blathering fool who runs around the house. “Where’s the phone, where’s the phone. Who had the stupid phone last?”

It’s not as if we have only one phone either. We have five of the little bleeper’s and my mother-in-law, although I am far too charitable to mention it to her, was the reason our last four phones died.

She is lost in the time warp of a generation ago where you physically hung the phone up. She cannot grasp the fact that if you hang the phone on the charger every time you use it, it will ruin the charge. Before long, the battery runs out when you say hello.

I know she did it because every other phone abusing body in our house insist they never hang the phones up; a fact I can attest to because when I run through the house on my daily marathons looking for the stupid things, they are always burned out.

So, if they don’t hang them up and I know there’s so such thing as evil phone fairies that lurk in dark corners, it must be my mother-in-law.

She is annoyed by the fact that when she finds the phone lying around and hangs it up that I make such a criminal offense about it. One I would love to make punishable by loss of a limb.

“We never had this kind of commotion in my home.” She NEVER fails to mutter, in the nicest possible way of course.

In my defense, not once was I asked to sit in on any design or engineering committee before the phone went into production. It’s a good thing to or I may have had my own ideas of where they could put the things.

Once we mastered the problem of mom not hanging the phones up, we had a new problem. When you do have to put the phone on to charge, how do you know when you can take it off the charger?

“Who hung this phone up? What time is it finished charging?’

“I hung one up this morning.” A voice rings out from somewhere.

“Which charger did you put it on?” Someone very brilliantly put two charges next to each other. “I don’t remember.”

From the corner, in the nicest possible way, “I’ve never seen a household with so many problems finding the phone.”

Garret finally devised a plan. He ripped a piece of paper, wrote down the time the phone would be charged then secured it to the phone with an elastic band. The boy is brilliant, takes after his mother.

Our phones looked like happy little penguins wearing white waistcoats while they recharged. Peace reigned again for about two weeks.

“Who didn’t write the time on this phone? How long is it supposed to be hung up?”

“I hung up the one with the paper on it,” said Ariana.

“It wasn’t me,” said Rick and Garret in unison.

In the nicest possible way, from the corner of the living room, I hear. “I’ve never seen a household have so many problems with the phone.”

Perhaps you heard me scream and rant, while I chased my eyeballs around in my head. I demand psychotherapy.

I should never be allowed to use the phone. Check back next week for part two.