Ring its neck
You know what I hate? The ineluctable inequality of a society based on a rigid class structure and inherited privilege, but that's not relevant right now.
You know what I hate?
Phones.
I will concede that the Spawn of Satan telephone has its use, and that use is limited to one thing and one thing only: the communication of some piece of information. For example, when The Husband and I are out and about in town, and I feel that there could be no better use of my time than perusing a number of footwear retailers, whereas The Husband is of the opinion that a pint of something foamy would better suit his needs. Two apparently conflicting courses of action, yet these can be reconciled with one short (very short) phone call:
Act I, Scene I. A Public House. A mobile telephone rings. The tall man with a glass in front of him answers it:
Me: What pub are you in?
The Husband: The Angry Pig
Me: Okay, see you there in a couple of minutes
The Husband: Please tell me you didn't buy any more sh...
*click*
Curtain falls. Applause.
See? Simple! And yet for some people their phone is so much more than a device for long-distance information transfer. They buy their phones little clothes, and furniture. Their phones are like pets - or possibly children - to them, and they have deep and meaningful relationships with them, and can't bear to cut them off in case they feel lonely or something. And then you get situations like this:
Scene: Me, at home, enjoying a peaceful, non-telephone-based lifestyle:
*ring ring*
Me: *Sighs and picks the bloody thing up*
Idiot Friend: Wassup?
Me: If you have some information to impart to me, do it now, quickly and efficiently, so I can put this vile instrument of Satan down and get on with my non-telephone-based lifestyle
(Actually, that's not really what I say...)
Now, in many cases it transpires that the Idiot Friend does indeed have some information transfer in mind, albeit of a fairly trivial and pointless nature, but instead of simply getting to the point, what I get is a opening ping-pong of Wassup-isms of some form or another, followed by the worst evil imaginable. The pause. The expectant pause. The expectant pause that somehow I am expected to fill, because apparently it is my responsibility to entertain idiots who randomly interrupt me telephonically.
At this point, I have two options; I can do the Small Talk thing, at which I am reasonably accomplished, or I can do the Awkward Silence thing right back. Social conditioning usually has me opting for option A, but surely it is the responsibility of the person initiating the phone call to do the talking? And surely the obvious corollary is that if you have nothing to say, then don't phone!
Some people who phone, of course, can talk for Britain and have one-sided monologues conversations that go on for over an hour. At first, this doesn't seem as bad as the tooth-drilling wretchedness of being called by an Awkward Silencer, but then you realise you are stuck with this horrid little phone pressed to your ear for an hour, occasionally having to go "uh-uh" and "mmmmm.." to prove that you haven't hung up, and your precious, precious life is ebbing away in front of your eyes, and your ear hurts, and you can only make out one word in three, and all the time there is the ever-present threat that the Monologuer will suddenly turn into an Awkward Silencer and you'll be expected to fill the gap.
But even that only makes second place on the List Of Things I Hate About Phones. What I really hate is being asked to answer someone else's mobile phone. You know - when the stupid device starts playing its stupid little tune, and its owner is otherwise engaged, and they say to you "... Oh, would you get that?" and you think "here's a radical notion, why not just ignore it?" but you have to pick it up, and you have approximately 12.4 seconds to figure out how this thing which is more complicated that the original Apollo Moon Rocket works - does it flip open, or slide, or what? - and even if you get it open, there are three zillion buttons with random, meaningless symbols on them which could do anything from answering the call to turning the thing into a flying car, so you stab one randomly knowing that you have about a 95 per cent probability of selecting the one which will cut the call off, and even if by some miracle you push the right one your 12.4 seconds are up and the caller hangs up that very instant, because you couldn't possibly have been doing something else that might take precedence over answering a phone!
And if you refuse to attempt to answer it on the grounds that it's a stupid device which you have no idea how to operate, then the owner gets all upset, because you insulted their darling child phone, and everyone can see that its just the smartest, cutest, cleverest, most fascinating and easy-to-understand child phone in the whole world, not some sort of backward idiot of a child phone, and they're just going out to buy it a new shiney thing because you've hurt its feelings!
(This rant is (tangentially) brought to you by The Husband being put out about the fact that I wouldn't use his phone on Sunday to call a restaurant. It had earlier taken him twenty minutes - plus cursing - to actually enter the restaurant's number into the phone. He was unimpressed by my logic that the probability of me actually being able to find and call this number on his phone was precisely zero.)
You know what I hate?
Phones.
I will concede that the Spawn of Satan telephone has its use, and that use is limited to one thing and one thing only: the communication of some piece of information. For example, when The Husband and I are out and about in town, and I feel that there could be no better use of my time than perusing a number of footwear retailers, whereas The Husband is of the opinion that a pint of something foamy would better suit his needs. Two apparently conflicting courses of action, yet these can be reconciled with one short (very short) phone call:
Act I, Scene I. A Public House. A mobile telephone rings. The tall man with a glass in front of him answers it:
Me: What pub are you in?
The Husband: The Angry Pig
Me: Okay, see you there in a couple of minutes
The Husband: Please tell me you didn't buy any more sh...
*click*
Curtain falls. Applause.
See? Simple! And yet for some people their phone is so much more than a device for long-distance information transfer. They buy their phones little clothes, and furniture. Their phones are like pets - or possibly children - to them, and they have deep and meaningful relationships with them, and can't bear to cut them off in case they feel lonely or something. And then you get situations like this:
Scene: Me, at home, enjoying a peaceful, non-telephone-based lifestyle:
*ring ring*
Me: *Sighs and picks the bloody thing up*
Idiot Friend: Wassup?
Me: If you have some information to impart to me, do it now, quickly and efficiently, so I can put this vile instrument of Satan down and get on with my non-telephone-based lifestyle
(Actually, that's not really what I say...)
Now, in many cases it transpires that the Idiot Friend does indeed have some information transfer in mind, albeit of a fairly trivial and pointless nature, but instead of simply getting to the point, what I get is a opening ping-pong of Wassup-isms of some form or another, followed by the worst evil imaginable. The pause. The expectant pause. The expectant pause that somehow I am expected to fill, because apparently it is my responsibility to entertain idiots who randomly interrupt me telephonically.
At this point, I have two options; I can do the Small Talk thing, at which I am reasonably accomplished, or I can do the Awkward Silence thing right back. Social conditioning usually has me opting for option A, but surely it is the responsibility of the person initiating the phone call to do the talking? And surely the obvious corollary is that if you have nothing to say, then don't phone!
Some people who phone, of course, can talk for Britain and have one-sided monologues conversations that go on for over an hour. At first, this doesn't seem as bad as the tooth-drilling wretchedness of being called by an Awkward Silencer, but then you realise you are stuck with this horrid little phone pressed to your ear for an hour, occasionally having to go "uh-uh" and "mmmmm.." to prove that you haven't hung up, and your precious, precious life is ebbing away in front of your eyes, and your ear hurts, and you can only make out one word in three, and all the time there is the ever-present threat that the Monologuer will suddenly turn into an Awkward Silencer and you'll be expected to fill the gap.
But even that only makes second place on the List Of Things I Hate About Phones. What I really hate is being asked to answer someone else's mobile phone. You know - when the stupid device starts playing its stupid little tune, and its owner is otherwise engaged, and they say to you "... Oh, would you get that?" and you think "here's a radical notion, why not just ignore it?" but you have to pick it up, and you have approximately 12.4 seconds to figure out how this thing which is more complicated that the original Apollo Moon Rocket works - does it flip open, or slide, or what? - and even if you get it open, there are three zillion buttons with random, meaningless symbols on them which could do anything from answering the call to turning the thing into a flying car, so you stab one randomly knowing that you have about a 95 per cent probability of selecting the one which will cut the call off, and even if by some miracle you push the right one your 12.4 seconds are up and the caller hangs up that very instant, because you couldn't possibly have been doing something else that might take precedence over answering a phone!
And if you refuse to attempt to answer it on the grounds that it's a stupid device which you have no idea how to operate, then the owner gets all upset, because you insulted their darling child phone, and everyone can see that its just the smartest, cutest, cleverest, most fascinating and easy-to-understand child phone in the whole world, not some sort of backward idiot of a child phone, and they're just going out to buy it a new shiney thing because you've hurt its feelings!
(This rant is (tangentially) brought to you by The Husband being put out about the fact that I wouldn't use his phone on Sunday to call a restaurant. It had earlier taken him twenty minutes - plus cursing - to actually enter the restaurant's number into the phone. He was unimpressed by my logic that the probability of me actually being able to find and call this number on his phone was precisely zero.)