Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I receive about one phone call a week from an actual person. What happened?

I have a cell phone. I still have a landline phone. Several times a day, the landline rings and a nice computer voice tells me about home improvement. These computer voices are becoming nicer. I guess that is an improvement to these unwanted interruptions.

Sometimes an actual person calls me on one of these two phone numbers. That happens about once a week.

Perhaps my memory is lapsing, but it seems that people used to call me on the phone. Relatives called. Soccer teams called. People called. We talked. We decided. We acted.

I guess text messages replaced conversations. Wait a minute—I don’t receive text messages from actual people, either. Hmm. It must be email? Nope. Nothing there, either.

I don’t know what happened. No one calls me. No one wants to talk to me or engage me or anything. At least the folks at the coffee shops recognize me when I walk in.