There’s something about where Gary attaches his Blackberry to his pants that makes the redial button activate easily. My cell phone’s voice mail frequently records tedious silent messages dialed from Gary’s Blackberry. I’ll have to listen to three solid minutes of Gary driving and listening to NPR, or Gary ordering a smoothie, or Gary walking down the hall. I know it’s Gary because the voice mail remembers, so I just ask Gary again to set his Blackberry so his pants don’t accidentally call the last number dialed.
(Once, Gary’s Blackberry called his parents, who screen their calls with the answering machine. They listened to a few minutes of Gary walking, terrified they were getting an obscene phone call.)
Gary’s pants call my cell about once a week, and usually I just delete it, unless it’s a really interesting NPR bit I haven’t heard. But this time I recognized Gary’s voice and the voices of two or three women he works with. So, I got to a quiet place and listened intently.
At first, all I could hear was women squawking like the teacher on the Charlie Brown specials, and then Gary responding with “Oh, that’s disgusting.”
“WahWAHwhahwhawah Wahhh.”
“Yuk!” said Gary. He sounded a little grumpy, not flirty like I would have expected given that he was talking to a group of women. Clearly, this was why the Blackberry had turned him in. And then one woman distinctly said: “I never put anything down.”
Gary perked up and replied, “Oh, my wife puts everything down. Everything! I never put anything down myself.”
At first it seemed like this was a blatant LIE, but as it turned out they were talking about garbage disposers. And spurred on by female attention, Gary went on to expound:
“Ellen’s crazy! She puts all kinds of stuff down there! Grease! Pork bones, chicken bones!” (All lies.) “I’ll tell her, ‘Don’t put that stuff in the garbage disposer!’ and she just smiles and keeps shoveling it in there.” (Possibly not a lie.) “She told me once her father said you had to exercise the garbage disposer by putting stuff down it since it sharpens the blades.” (My dad is dead. This is lying about the dead. Unforgivable.)
How did Gary develop this mocking tone about me? I cannot imagine.