Phone Phobia

I think I am beginning to develop some kind of sixth sense. These days, when my mobile starts to ring, I am able to correctly guess who the caller may be. As I have grown older, the stronger my clairvoyance seems to have got.

Or in other words, the number of people who call me has come down to the bare minimum. It appears that only the closest of my friends call (that’s about three, right now). So you can see, I am right about thirty percent of the time.

I guess I am ready to have my own 1-800-PSYCHIC number.

But there is a small problem with my idea. I suck when it comes to talking on the phone.

My conversational skills on the phone are only slightly better than my ballet dancing skills. I just cannot keep a conversation going and very soon it ends up being a question-answer session. It reminds me of my engineering lab days where the lecturer would ask me questions on the project that I had done and I would respond back with…well…weird noises hoping that at least one of us could make sense out of what I was trying to say.

But I digress, the issue is my first reaction when I take a call is to try and get out of it as quickly as possible. But I am so used to my cell and the excuses that I make that it gets me in trouble sometimes

"Hey listen, I am entering a subway, catching a lot of static. Will have to call you back"

"This is your land line, you jackass"

"Oh umm...in that case, I guess I don't really like talking to you"

I have lost a few friends that way. But on the bright side, like I said before, my psychic abilities have gone up.

The other dreaded dead-end conversation is when both of us have nothing to talk about. And I don’t know if it is just an Indian thing or the malaise is world wide, the only conversation filler is what I call the preemptive question…. “So what else ?”. This is a question people ask when they don’t have anything else to say but still want to hang on to the call (more so when it is you who is getting billed)

It happens when you are pretty much done telling everything there is worth telling about including the description of dust on your window, then you pause...the other person asks “So what else ?”. Sometimes I tell them.

I have lost a few more friends that way.

But now that my caller list is reduced to the absolute minimum who pretend to be close friends because I suspect I still owe them money, I have decided to work on my conversational skills. I cannot afford to lose any more callers. I am now getting the hang of handling the “So what else ?” question. I have learned to just make up stuff.

Hopefully, I will get better at this as I go on.

I could write a lot more but I think I am catching a lot of static, must be a http tunnel...gotta go...