YOUR CALL IS SO PRECIOUS!

A while back, because of her mom's health issues, my apartment mate's siblings forced her to get a cellphone. They set it up, and sprung it on her. Even though Mom died three or four years ago, she still has it. It has a most irritating ringtone, doesn't take photos, and is meant only for emergencies. Which every person who has been given that number would know.
I don't have the number, because I don't use cellphones.
There's a landline in this apartment.
And I never asked.

[People have strongly suggested to me that my life would improve immensely if I acquired a cellphone, why, the twenty first century would come up warmly dancing with pom poms! Or some such. People with Aspergers in the main do not use phones socially. Complaints, collection phone calls, and plumbing emergencies, are NOT social calls.
No matter what you have been told.]


This morning her phone rang.

She ran to her room to answer it.

Robo call.

In Mandarin.


"Yeah, I probably DO have relatives in China, but we don't know those people! Fry the bitches, fry them!"


So much for Chinese love of family. The robo call scammers have the wrong target. Yeah, she's Chinese, ethnically, but she was born here, her family speaks English, and her Daddy was Canto from Texas. And most of the Toishanese kinfolk in San Francisco to whom her Mom forced her to be polite were irritating countryside blisters who hadn't seen a rice paddy since at least the Eisenhower years. Any relationship with needy post-Mao relatives who speak Mandarin must, necessarily, be tenuous.


A phone call may not enter into it.


Last week I heard her telling a phone salesperson that before she would even consider new roofing for the rainy season, she would have to see some lobster. "Where's my lobster? I haven't seen a lobster in so long, so long!!! Well?!?" That call did not end the way the salesperson planned.
Lobster outranks corrugated polycarbonate.
"Oh go fry an egg!"
Click.

One of these days the Lobster Rights Board will angrily come looking for her, wielding The Giant Claw of Chastisement. She is a strongminded woman, so their asses will be buttered.



We share the kitchen, bathroom, teevee, and landline. And certain ideas and attitudes. But our social routines are separate, and we don't even know each other's work phones. If there's an emergency, we'll probably leave sticky notes on the table in the teevee room.

Don't call.




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