Wayne's Wisdom:
Don't ever assume you know who's on the phone when you answer a call.
Finish your greeting like a normal sober individual and then initiate the conversation about how we should go all Hiroshima on the middle-east because a dude with a turban cut you off in the 7-Eleven parking lot and made you spill your Sour Patch flavored Slurpee.
It may seem harmless to just open up with the familiar tense of the N word when you think you know who it is; the problem is, the time you do open up with a casual conversation about how your best friend's girlfriend is a bitch, you'll be piped through his car's Bluetooth and she'll be sitting shotgun, and waiting for you with a figurative shotgun that'll put a snake shot right into the ass of the relationship you have with your homeboy.
It may sound like I'm speaking from experience here, and well, I am. You see, I was at the pizzeria that I've been delivering for for over a decade when I was forced into answering a phone call. I usually avoided phone calls because customers constantly make me feel like my head is being slammed in my driver's side door. The yelling, the screaming, the lies, it's just all too much for me to handle since I'm barely holding onto my last dose of humanity as it is. Unfortunately, no one else was around and we were getting crushed, so I was forced to endure what I can only describe as a jalapeno and anchovy enema. That's what the average phone call feels like anyway. In a fortunate turn of events the phone call turned out to be our shift runners mom. Right when I realized who it was I said I would go get her daughter who just so happened to be running the shit-show that was going on that particular day. The shift runner/daughter was a kind hearted teenage girl that was in the midst of one of the most hectic rushes the store had ever seen. Well, when I told the girl that her mom was trying to place an order and that she was on the phone, the shift runner/daughter stormed over next to me and picked up the line at the adjacent terminal and venomously said, "It's busy right now, call again some other time!" She then went to hang up the receiver before she heard a snappy, "Excuse me? I should hang up?" You see, my unlucky co-worker picked up the the wrong line. I knew this because I was still holding the line with her mom on it. So she just so happened to pick up the phone and get a random customer that wanted to order a pizza. Thus she was telling this potential pizza connoisseur to essentially go fornicate with herself. The lovely and always unbelievably nice shift runner then had to spend the better part of the next few minutes unsuccessfully backpedaling and apologizing about how she thought that she was talking to her mom.
This is why you should never answer the phone with anything besides a greeting, because no matter how sure you are that you're in the clear, there's still a rock solid chance that you'll pound a Mai Tai or two, see the name of your lifelong friend Jorge pop up on caller ID, and open up with a joke about how he's a goddamn dirty wetback when in reality it's your Hispanic union rep calling you about your new hourly wage scale.
This really isn't that hard. Just sound off with a simple hello before letting the racial epithets flood the room like the flash flood that sent ankle deep water into my apartment. Seriously, fuck California. We're in the midst of the biggest drought California has faced since the 1930's Dust Bowl and my place gets flooded. Actually, fuck it, answer the phone however you want. Get dumped or fired, what do I care? I'm too busy dealing with my couch absorbing eighty pounds of sewage water to dispense helpful advice. Here's my apartment complex:
