Lassie! Help! Help! Timmy's Been Inundated with Phone Calls!

Matt Smith?

What do people who get phone calls talk about?

I get, like, a phone call. Maybe two. Rarely both in the same day, unless there's something truly spectacular happening... like, the earth ran into the sun. Well. Maybe not that spectacular. Maybe just California-is-falling-into-the-Pacific spectacular. At any rate, I don't get phone calls unless one of two things is happening: 1) someone is returning my phone call to them, or 2) something/one is crashing/falling into something/one else.

Yes. That sums it up right nicely.

With that in mind, I wonder what the hell this girl sitting across from me had going for her that she should get not one, not two, not THREE phone calls while riding the T... but six. Six phone calls. During a 15-minute train ride. It upsets me enough to just have used two sentence fragments in a row. It upsets me enough so that there may be an indeterminate amount of sentence fragments yet to be written in this blog entry.

The thing that really got me was, the six phone calls seemed to be about the same topic. Her doctor's appointment. She missed it. Know how I know? She told the people on the other end of the phone. She told each of them individually. I don't know six people who need to know that I missed my doctor's appointment. My doctor doesn't even care that I miss my doctor's appointment. What the hell does she care? She still gets paid. In fact, if I don't give her enough notice, she gets paid more than she would have had I actually shown up. So the doctor phone call is right out.

Would my mother care if I missed a doctor's appointment? The answer to that is -- simply put -- no. My mother hadn't been to the doctor's office in almost 25 years until some random physical for a job dragged her there. So there you have it. Mother phone call. Out of the running.

Would my friends care if I missed that doctor's appointment? Probably not. Certainly not six friends, all at practically the same time. How would they even know that I missed it? Did I call them first? Is this a subject that I just randomly bring up on the phone? Now, looking back on that doctor-avoiding train-girl, I think she must have brought it up at least twice. But not every time. Sometimes she just agreed with them that missing the doctor's appointment was a bad thing and didn't it suck that she was stuck in the office working all day. Yeah.

Do I even have six friends? More than likely. Are any of them doctors whose appointments I've missed? Absolutely not. (And of course we now know that even if they were, they wouldn't call. They would just collect the payments.) Does the conversation take a turn for the better? Well, in train-girl's case, no. She just got phone call after phone call, never changing the subject, never letting the other person tell her about their doctor's appointment. Strange conversation manipulating girl.

Maybe the six phone calls were all from the same person who just happened to have short term memory loss? Maybe there weren't really six phone calls, and I was experiencing some sort of rapid-fire deja-vu? Maybe the train was simply moving back and forth across the space-time continuum?

The world may never... I mean... I may never know. The world simply doesn't care.

Not about me. And not about my silly doctor's appointments.

That is all.
- Meredith

P.S. I hear the job search is not so hot. Keep on keeping on, my friend. And if you need a change of scenery, me and Boston will still be here, greeting you with open arms and lots of non sequitur phone calls. Or maybe just lots of non sequitur. Something. We'll be here with something. (Maybe cheese. Or greeting cards. Or greeting cards made of cheese.)