Disconnect

Wayne's Wisdom:

Please join the 21st century and set up your voicemail. 

Listen, I understand being behind the times. I still have a standard clam-shell flip phone. That's right, that means I have no Twitter, no Facebook, no FaceTime and no soul sucking match three games that were made by money hungry hacks that make up for their lack of artistic ability by having the unending urge to kill the human spirit and make productivity screech to a grinding halt. And despite being the youngest adult male in the Northern Hemisphere to still lack a smartphone, I still successfully managed to set up my voicemail. I know most people, myself included, don't check their voicemail even if they do receive a message, but that's not the point here. What setting up your voicemail does is ensure that a figurative and literal message will be sent that the call that was placed had some level of importance. Like when I'm delivering a pizza and can't get a hold of you because you apparently felt compelled to go on a road trip to the Vons located three counties away to withdraw pocket change from the ATM to pay me with. A message in this scenario should key you in on the fact that the strange number that's been trying to ring through to you for the last thirty minutes isn't a telemarketer, but in fact is now the fantastically pissed off peon that was forced to attempt to funnel you fast food despite your self-imposed difficulties in letting me do so. 

I'm not telling you to duct tape your Galaxy Note to the side of your face so that I always have access to you. I'm not even asking that you answer every single strange phone number. I fully understand that around 97% of the time the caller in question is an illegal immigrant whose Horchata lovin' sausage fingers are too fat to dial the correct number on his or her burner phone. I also know that the other 2% of the time it seems to be the local blood-bank. At least for me anyway. I swear to God, it really seems like blood drives insist on getting every Ebonics speaking phlebotomist West of the Mississippi to spam my phone on a bi-weekly basis. The Red Cross is honestly killing my urge to be generous. Seriously, let a weekend pass without trying to guilt me into donating my blood. I'm willing to do it of my own volition. Just let the process occur naturally. If I see your Winnebago parked outside of my local Walmart, I'll give you some platelets and a solid 30 minutes of my time. This is all besides the point, though. The real problem here lies with the outlying one percent of the time that the call isn't the San Diego Blood Bank or a Honduran that's trying to phone home. That leftover one percent is me. It's me begging and praying that you'll pick up your phone so I can put down the 23 pounds of pizza that is costing our store around $5 dollars to make, $5 dollars to deliver and .25 cents every wasted minute after that. Oh, and don't forget that this process required that some pig give up it's life to be gloriously set in front of your face. Not that people actually care about the cost of their negligence. That requires some amount of awareness to shine down through the cloud cover known as narcissism that's covering the majority of millennials out there.  

Honestly, all I'm asking for is that if you're repeatedly getting a strange number spamming your line and you just placed an order for a physical service to be hand delivered to you, answer your phone. Or, at the very least, set up your voicemail so I can fire that digital signal flare into your prefrontal cortex. With a simple answered call or voicemail I can inform you about how I'm standing at your front door and can see you sitting on your living room couch watching the extended edition of Transformers 3 with your surround system registering in at a Richter scale of 3.4. This tiny favor and fractionally small bit of exerted effort doesn't just benefit me. Quite the opposite, a little awareness will guarantee that your food will arrive fresh and fast. Maybe even fast enough for me to actually get an extra delivery or two and eventually afford a real smartphone of my very own one day.