Not Wanting Call Waiting

A VIEW FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW
By Chris Sherman
Not Wanting Call Waiting

People actually come up to me on the street and ask me to complain in writing about call-waiting, and so, due to popular demand, call-waiting is going to have to bend over for a well-deserved spanking. If you have call-waiting, you may be offended, but I think it’s only fair to know what people are saying about you behind your back.
People who don’t have call-waiting, and even some who do, hate to be engaged in a call-waiting conversation. You’re on the phone with a dear friend, pouring out your heart and soul, laying bare your innermost thoughts and feelings, when suddenly you get a sense that your voice is being muted. Your friend is getting “beeped”. He apologizes with all the gusto of a prisoner facing fifty years to life for “accidentally” bludgeoning his wife to death with a barbecue utensil. You are asked with false annoyance if you wouldn’t mind “holding on”. You are immediately taken aback. You feel cut off and frustrated. Conversation-interuptus. “No... sure, go ahead,” you say, trying to sound like a team player.
Now all your insecurities come into play. Who will your friend choose to talk with? Will he stick with you or dump you for the more charming and charismatic second caller? Has he been bored with your conversation all along, and relieved at the interruption? It’s like he’s saying, “Hold on, this call might be better than your call.”
All this goes through your mind in the five seconds it takes for him to get back to you, and aren’t you secretly relieved when he does?
“Not important. It was just Buster. I can call him later .” Now your wondering if he says the same thing when you are the one interrupting a call.
It would be like you’re sitting on the sofa having a very heated conversation with your soon-to-be-ex-wife about how you are going to divide your mutual assets when in charges your soon-to-be-ex- mother-in-law, whom you have affectionately named “The Battleship Interference”. She sits right down between the two of you and refuses to budge until she is acknowledged. Your spouse, favoring her mother over a “dirty rotten scoundrel” like you, (her words, not mine), asks that you stop talking and leave the room, so that she can give all her attention to her mother. You’d feel mighty frustrated and angry wouldn’t you?
I can already hear multitudes of parents screaming out there, “But what if my child needs to reach me in an emergency and I am on the phone with my long-winded Aunt Sadie?” To them I scream right back, “Call waiting should only be permitted with caller-ID!” If you are on the phone counseling a grieving friend and you get a “beep”, you can check your handy little caller ID screen. Is it daughter Jenny calling from the side of the road in a hurricane with a flat tire, or is it that darn Aunt Sadie again? Oh, it’s Aunt Sadie. You’ll call her later, after your friend has had a good cry.
I think call-waiting is rude. It gives one a false sense of importance. Let’s face it, if you were so important, you’d have your own secretary to be rude to people for you. (My dear friend, a long-time subscriber to call-waiting, always reminds me that although I don’t have call waiting, I must ask her a million times to “hold on” while I yell at the kids. Point well taken.)
Are pro-call-waiters so afraid they are going to miss something, like Rich Aunt Sadie is making out the will and the line is busy? Are they in such demand that everyone must have access to them at every moment? And why would anyone want to be so available?
So, there it is. A public complaint voiced against call-waiting. If I have offended anyone, I’m sorry. At the sound of the beep, feel free to switch to a different column.

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