Pocket-Calls From Texas
Posted under: ShawnTheGreat
Steven’s brother lives in Texas. We’ll call him ShawnTheGreat, because that’s his name.
A couple weeks ago, my phone rings. Since my phone pretty much never rings, I darted downstairs to answer it and picked it up at the last minute.
“Hello?” I say.
Muffled, as if from a distance, I hear ShawnTheGreat talking with a group of people. It’s just after 5, so I assumed he was calling us on his way home for something.
“Hello? Shawn?” I say, a little louder.
No response.
I shrug and hand the phone to Steven. “It’s your brother, but I don’t think he knows he called us,” I say, then go back to whatever I was doing.
Half an hour later, I hear Steven laughing downstairs. I glance down and see he’s STILL listening to the phone.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
He hangs up the phone with a GIANT grin on his face. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he says, then picks up the phone and calls his brother back.
Interlude: Here is what he was listening to.
ShawnTheGreat is a manager/supervisor at a company where his staff does mostly phone tech support.
Shawn purchased an item called the Annoy-O-Matic (or something, I don’t remember the actual name). Basically, it’s a tiny, tiny, tiny machine that you can stick somewhere and it will periodically (after a random time period between one and thirty minutes) emit a high-pitched BEEP.
That’s it.
Shawn stuck this in the cubicle of one of his co-workers before the guy (we’ll call him Bill) came in.
“Did you hear that?” asks Bill after getting in.
“Hear what?” asks Shawn.
“Nothing, nevermind.”
…
“There it was again!”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“It sounds like my monitor’s beeping. ARG!”
(*snicker*)
Time Passes
A few hours later, Bill had gone so crazy from the phantom beeping that he had actually pulled his monitor on to his lap and was LISTENING to it, when the tech girl walked in.
“Um, what are you doing?” she asked him.
“I think my monitor’s beeping,” he answered her.
“…monitors don’t have speakers. Your monitor CAN’T beep,” she said.
Bill gave her a despairing look and she took pity on him. “It could be the power strip from the empty cube right across from you,” she suggested.
Desperate, he walked away from his desk to unplug it and she followed.
Quietly, while he was gone, Shawn slipped into Bill’s cube and turned off the Annoy-o-matic.
Shortly thereafter, Bill went to lunch, crowing with delight that he’d solved the problem and the beeping had stopped.
During Lunch
While he was gone at lunch, Shawn turned it back on.
The reaction when Bill got back to his desk was PRICELESS.
The Big Reveal
Shawn explaining this situation to his co-workers (Yes, he did finally tell Bill what he’d done) was the very conversation that he was having when he accidentally dialed our number.
He had no idea that we were on the phone.
Therefore, it was with GREAT anticipation that Steven ended the one-sided phone call and dialed his brother back again.
“Hey, what’s up?” Shawn asked, getting into his truck to drive home.
“Hey brother,” said Steven, grinning from ear to ear. “Man, I’ve got a computer problem, I was wondering if you could help me.”
“No problem, what’s up?”
“Well, it’s really weird. My monitor keeps beeping –”
At which point Shawn basically lost the ability to breathe for about 30 minutes, he was laughing so hard.
It was one of those perfect opportunities that comes along so rarely in life. <3
That’s pretty freaking awesome! I was immediately (like, 50 words into your post) reminded that a couple years ago, we’d get these calls from our son Bryan, in Brooklyn.
Except…all we’d here were, like, bar noises. Somehow he was pocket-dialing my cell phone (which he NEVER calls, for reals). Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything we could really hear, so no funny story.
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I don’t think I’ve ever had such a perfect pocket dial either.
The conversation afterwards, as Shawn tried to think of WHO would have called Steven so quickly after it was all over was just awesome.