Missed Connections

It's always exciting to be greeted on Monday morning by a red flashing "message" light on the telephone cradle. It indicates that while I have been away from the office, someone has been trying to reach me, and is now anxiously awaiting my reply. Perhaps an important client or consultant has thought of an urgent question and dug up my number. Perhaps my crackpot landlady wishes to know why I have yet to donate any "interesting colors" of dryer lint to her friend's jewelry-making operation. Or maybe my HMO has tired of sending me new insurance cards every week, and wonders why I have yet to alert them who my physician is. (Answer: I have already told them, and received yet another new card weeks ago with his name on it. Nonetheless, I continued to receive new cards and angry form letters. At this point, they've probably wasted about $5 on postage and plastic cards. And people wonder why health insurance is so expensive...)

But no, none of these potentially thrilling scenarios ever materializes when I retrieve my message. It is, without fail, "Paul" from the (unspecified) prize department, frantically alerting me that it is in my best interest to contact him as soon as possible regarding the fantastic prizes in store for me. I've yet to call him back, but his persistence is beginning to wear on me. I also have relatively few friends in Washington (they are, in order, my girlfriend, Halfz, a local Ghanaian restauranteur, and the bank teller with whom I regularly discuss Dead Prez, Wu-Tang, and the comings and goings of each). I'd be happy to make a new friend; let's just hope that Paul's 800 number is not designed to conceal the troublesome detail that he does not, in fact, live in the greater Washington area.

Alongside my landlady, my coworkers, my HMO, and my parents, Paul is the only one who actually knows my work number. He just seems to call at the most inopportune times. On the rare occasions when he has found me at my desk, an undetermined problem with the line seems to prevent him from hearing me. "Hello, Paul!" I exclaim, "I've been meaning to call you back -- I've just been swamped." His discipline is impressive. He never deviates from his very businesslike and straight-to-the-point script in the face of these technical difficulties, clearly confident that once the problem is resolved I will contact him straight away.

With any luck, some day Paul will catch me on a glitch-free line. We'll probably take a few minutes to catch up, me asking how things are going in the prize department, and him asking about the Sharkitecture business. Then I'll finally get to hear what amazing things I've won -- cars, vacations, property, or some combination thereof. But it's not so much the prizes I'm concerned about. It is the prospect of finally receiving a call at work from someone other than my boss.