People Who Need People: If You Call Me One More Time I’m Sending My Cat to Your Lockdown to Jam That Fucking Phone Up Your Ass.
Wait, now I can’t even send my cat, because cats can get the Coronaplague, too. But that isn’t the point.
I have always hated talking on the phone more than any other chore in the world.
I am amazed that there are people who generally enjoy this activity. There are about three people in existence who make this an enjoyable activity for me. The rest of you, it’s misery, especially since I can barely hear you over these stupid walkie-talkies we use instead of land lines.
But oh boy, the portable pester-box has been really worth the trade-off to civilization: being able to pester me anywhere, anytime, or else you get to have a well-earned tantrum because you KNOW I have my phone and you KNOW I didn’t pick up on purpose, just to insult YOU, because that electronic leash follows every good cooperative citizen everywhere they go…
I knew cellphones were a bad idea when my narcissistic ex was an early adopter of phone flakiness in the early aughts: Being a tried-but-failed social butterfly in the Chicago acting scene, he was one of the first to discover that it was infinitely less socially troublesome to cancel plans on people when you at least could stop them before they went all the way to that bar that you were only really planning to meet them at if you couldn’t find anyone cooler to hang out with. (Or in my case, anyone with fatter tits.)
Little did I know, being ignored by someone you loved wasn’t the worst thing the cellphone and its fartchild, the smartphone, would bring: the worst would be getting constantly needled, hurried, and last-minute-summonsed, way beyond your capacity to handle it, by everyone you loved. And everyone you were indifferent to or hated. And everyone you’d ever met. And everyone who stalked you online. And people who dialed the wrong number but were desperately lonely, probably precisely because they are boring assholes, and…
DON’T. FUCKING. ADD. TO IT. ORIWILLFUCKINGWANTTOKILLYOU.
Never mind that it isn’t you I hate (well, till you call me repeatedly); it’s the phone itself. It lives in that uncanny valley between written communication and present speech: I can SORT OF hear you, but I can’t see you. How am I supposed to follow your pointless story if I can’t see your charming face?
I thought this was just me being insane or misanthropic till I finally got a science-y explanation for why it takes me an hour of wanting to murder whoever called to get back to work after such an interruption: my PTSD finally got so bad thanks to a couple additional near-deaths that a weary psychiatrist, attempting to tease a single storyline out of me, noticed I had lost control of the underlying ADHD.
I researched everything about ADHD and lo and behold, I found that mine is not the only dopamine-starved brainham that loathes and resents phone calls. (I AM misanthropic, but normally this should only manifest through mass shootings.) IT IS A SYMPTOM. SO STOP OPPRESSING ME.
ADHD makes your dumb story on the phone hard to follow, but that alone wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that, after enough near-misses with death, my first reaction to a ringing phone is fear. (Not only does the C-PTSD preclude a pleasant reaction to any type of alarm, there’s my history with the telephone in particular: when someone I love dies, there is ALWAYS a phone call. Always.)
And my go-to reaction to fear is blinding rage. LOUD IRRITATING NOISE OH MY GOD HE’S RIGHT BEHIND ME AGAIN HERE WE GO TO MURDER CITY KILL YOU FIRST KILL YOU KILL YOU KILL YOU.
My second reaction is annoyance, mostly because I know that YOU will be annoyed if I don’t respond to your stupid summons.
Excepting the two or three people I actually LIKE to have call me — who are probably very confused about now — everyone in my life has been told over and over how much I hate the phone. And yet, there you are, ready to be annoyed and a pissy little cunt if I don’t pick up.
Oh, the bitchy little voice messages I get. Fuck you. I delete them without listening these days, so the joke’s on you.
People do not understand that a phone call steals about three hours from an ADHD “patient” (I am actually rather impatient): 1. The hour it took for us to focus on the project we were working on when you selfishly called 2. The hour we’ll spend on the phone once we warm up to you and remember we at least kind of like you (assuming that’s the case… yes, a telemarketer actually steals less time than a “friend”), and 3. The hour it will take to return to focusing on the project.
Three fucking hours… and with the “friends” I’ve met since moving to LA, the call is always 100% about them, usually beginning with a declaration that their life is way worse than mine “so shut up and get on CashApp, I’ll pay you back (maybe) when I get my SSI.”
I made a rule when I was living in Madison, WI: I would never again deal with SSI scammer types — people who are on social security for a “mental condition” when they are not actually handicapped, but just a lazy asshole who still thinks they can become a successful arteest given enough free time.
If you’re always looking for “friends,” making “friends,” calling “friends,” you’re NOT EMOTIONALLY HANDICAPPED.
You could EASILY work in sales, but you hate capitalism because someone told you to, so you refuse to do anything even as marginally useful as the jobs your manipulative personality is a fit for.
SSI faking is a disease of shitty hippie towns. I forgot my no-SSI rule during those long years when I lived in Chicago, because while the downsides to that city are rape and flying bullets, at least people there have too much self-respect to sponge unless they really need it. Oh, I rue the days I forget these rules.
Here in Los Angeles, sponging is a way of life. Psychic sponging, too: it’s not enough to reach into everyone’s pocket for a fake disability check. People who latch onto you here will ignore your pleas for peace because the crises they’ve created for themselves are so overwhelmingly important.
Any local number in LA is ALWAYS someone you wish you had never met, asking for a free place to stay, or a $20 loan (that they’ll never pay back), on yet another obscure cash app they’ll expect you to spend your afternoon downloading and registering for, because they haven’t got their free money yet, and while they may look obese they are STARVING, and they’re too good to eat dollar-store quiche like I do, so they need to whine till they get more of your money.
(Dollar stores are the new classy, by the way. Some of these entrees are 800 calories for a dollar! Look, we’re all going to die in the post-plague mega-depression, and it’s taking you all WAY too long to realize that you need to start MAXIMIZING calories for your dollar, unless you’re one of those people who have such an easy life that you’re whining about the “quarantine fifteen,” in which case go suck a dick, it’s wonderful exercise, but wear a hazmat suit.)
Why didn’t I answer your ten Facebook calls? Because it’s fucking 2020, you self-centered jerk. I didn’t force you to contact me at all. Even if you legitimately want a friendly conversation, there is text, and there is actually meeting in person or Skyping, or there is AT LEAST sending a DM first to say hey, I’d like to talk on the phone, give me a call.
That way I can call you when I’m ready, not have you ambush me when I’m on some goddamn noisy street with no goddamn reception so I have to exhaust myself trying to piece together whatever bullshit it is that you’re whining about — and, most important, I don’t have to hear that demanding alarum beeping out your self-importance at me out of the blue. (Is it the phone I hate, or is it Los Angeles?)
The way these walkie-talkies cut in and out makes it all the worse: Oops, I managed to get interested in your self-centered complaint about nothing long enough to understand your awkward sentences — but then I missed 30 seconds of whining, so I have to start all over again; hope you don’t quiz me later! (Were you even listening?! No, I wasn’t. Did I ask you to pester me? No! So we’re even.)
There’s no excuse for calling someone who has repeatedly told you they lose three hours and have a panic attack (a real one, not your bullshit bitch panic attacks over who won an election, Jesus) whenever you interrupt them with a screeching alarm.
According to the Great Oracle Google, it’s I who must change. Ask the Oracle’s advice on this matter and it will tell one how to make oneself more effective on the phone and mellow oneself to accommodate all the dopes trying to tug one’s rope.
Nothing about getting you morons to use DMs.
I guess that makes sense for job interviews and such — they don’t know me and certainly don’t want to hear about my psychological chinks — but I’m done with accommodating “friend”/family assholes who have a million of their own little preferences they want me to tiptoe around, but still have to call me on the fucking phone.
Done with accommodating people who claim to care about me but ignore my misery when they use the phone to entertain themselves or demand my time or money at the expense of my sanity…
Am I the one being unreasonable to expect people who “care” about me to write a damn text? Some people say they hate texting as much as I hate the phone, which I don’t understand… unless they’re plotting to steal from me or something and don’t want to leave evidence.
More charitably: are they illiterate? Isn’t it easier to read a text than to hear someone talking over a shitty radio? It exhausts me.
Why am I friends with people who are illiterate? Why do I care about people who don’t care if they give me a panic attack and drain half my energy for the afternoon, going “What? What? Someone is screaming over on your end, and some buttplug with a souped-up engine is roaring down this street where I have to walk because I can’t get reception inside, and also you won’t ever put your stupid mouth anywhere near your phone even though YOU CALLED ME BECAUSE YOU’RE DRUNK AND WANT ME FOR ENTERTAINMENT. WHAT DID YOU SAY? REPEAT THAT? OH YOU CAN’T HEAR ME? I THINK I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL THE NEXT PERSON WHO CALLS ME ON THIS SHIT MACHINE OF SOCIAL BUTTERFLY HORROR, DID YOU FUCKING HEAR THAT?”
Why is it that I am acutely aware of the fleeting and fragile nature of life, and yet I tolerate awful friends because, for a moment weeks or months or years ago, we saw humanity in each other?
Yes, I saw humanity in you. And then you did so many mind-blowingly inconsiderate things… things I can’t begin to imagine how shitty I would feel if I did them to someone, because I would never DO them to anyone.
WHY? WHY do I tolerate friendship with people who see no moral or ethical problem in using our friendship endlessly in ways big and small, merely because we have been through some shit together?
I began this habit working in the trenches in foodservice, which was a neuroticism factory and clearinghouse of the 1990s, come to think of it. But I have continued this habit, putting up with annoying shits because of “friendship” — everybody’s got a couple of douchebag friends, right? — till inevitably the shit is revealed as a whole septic tank o’ narcissism. Am I insane or is it you who iz insane? No matter, your incessant calling on the phone still makes me dislike you, and that’s my answer to whether I should bother with you right there.
The next time I am peacefully listening to music while I walk down the street and then someone calls me out of the blue and then gets annoyed because there’s noise from the cars because they caught me when I was on a road when they voluntarily called me out of the CLEAR BLUE, HUMAN-FREE SKY, I’m going to hang up and block their number.
Why do I have more than three friends, anyway? It’s not like I have any free time anyway. And in the vast majority of cases my affection won’t be returned. Most people I meet don’t seem to care about their “friends” much, if at all. Maybe I think everyone has a douchebag friend because everyone not-so-secretly feels superior to their friends; the little people are just there to float on as they rise.
Friends are fonts of money, jobs, connections, ins to “projects.” Networking has poisoned all the water, and portable phones have forced us to drink it at all times. Why can’t the invisible soldiers from Planet Covid-19 take out the communications satellites? That would be marvelous. The people who can’t read and can’t live without Netflix and telephone blather would hang themselves in quarantine.
I’ve always hated the Jule Styne song that Barbra Streisand hammed up so nauseatingly in Funny Girl:
People who need people / are the luckiest people in the world.
I swear to god that stupid goddamn song was about networking, cronyism, and back-scratching. But was it sincere or a sly satire? I’m going to try to figure out whether Jule Styne wrote it as a satire or not, and that’s how I’ll decide who to kill first when the real apocalypse begins.
Covanids, if you’re gonna tear through the world like Hannibal on an invisible elephant, could you at least kill the right people? Why do I have to do it for you?
Anyway, this is MY obnoxious cry for free advice, from anyone out there who’s known why they hate the telephone for longer than I have:
Have you any good ideas for getting people to respect your fucking loathing for the telephone?…
Riiiight, that’s what I thought. Fuck it then, goodbye to almost all of my friends.
The more I think about it, the better that idea sounds. If they want to decide I’m an asshole for having preferences — especially the ones who demand that everyone tiptoe around THEIR snowflake shit — then I’m not begging for a vacation from their shit, I am leaving. Sorry for my QUIRK ! You can think about what an asshole I am all on yer lonesome.
I’ve always got myself, and my tiiiiiiiiiiiiny number of people I really trust. I’m good. Well, except for the networking and the careers and shit.
Fortunately for assholes like me, publishing is dead and Hollywood is dying! The age of assholes like YOU is in peril.
At last! The age where I don’t need you is about to begin. The age of sincerity. The age of having all my free time to give to people I genuinely like, and who really like me in return.
Up till now, it has been unfortunate that I am a writer by vocation, while I have no patience for shitheads, and almost none of the people I can stand are “in the business.” Aw, too cruel, huh? Too bad for me. But now, I’m fine. Cause I’m going to make it OK to produce my own scripts with me playing every role.
Why not? It’s a brand-new Coronaverse. And in the Plague Decade, people needing people will no longer be the luckiest people in this shithole world.
If you need people, the apocalypse probably ain’t your place to shine. Aw, darn. Isn’t that too cruel?
