Call waiting for Godot

By Tony Carnevale Catalyst

Send comments to: catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Tony Carnevale

All is not rosy with the telephone, however. For one thing, there aren't any pictures. We've had 120 years to make a frigging videophone, and the biggest technological advance we could come up with was three-way calling. Please. Even in George Orwell's 1984 they had videophones. They were miserable, pathetic, brainwashed slaves, but they still had videophones. And it was 1984.

Speaking of three-way calling, there are too many worthless little extras of its ilk these days. The worst is surely Call Waiting. This was something not even Orwell could come up with. Let's think about the multifaceted evil of Call Waiting for a minute.

Alice, who has Call Waiting, is on the phone with Bob. Carl calls Alice. Instead of a busy signal, Carl hears a ringing signal. But Alice's phone isn't ringing - instead, Bob's voice drops out at regular intervals.

"Can you hold?" asks Alice. "I've got another call."

"Sure," says Bob, because what are you going to say? "No, you will not put me on hold?" Right. So now Bob is cradling a dead phone to his ear like some kind of zombie phone-junkie, to whom even a silent phone is better than none at all.

"Hello?" says Alice, now connected with Carl. Alice sounds pissed off, because people who are interrupted by Call Waiting are invariably pissed off. They subscribed to Call Waiting, they actually paid money for it, and when it does its job, they're pissed off.

Carl, instantly sensing that Alice is pissed off, decides not to ask her to the drive-in Saturday night, thus abandoning the beginnings of a relationship that, if consummated, would have produced a child whose brilliant scientific mind would have devised a cure for AIDS, and maybe a videophone. Tragic.

The phone companies just love Call Waiting. It's to their advantage to have as many simultaneous phone connections as possible. If Bob and Carl both called Alice long-distance, that's two long-distance bills ticking away at once, even though only one person gets to talk to Alice at a time.

Why, then, do people actually pay for Call Waiting? Simple. It makes them feel cool to be talking to one person, and have another on hold. Like they're a customer service hotline of friendship. "Sorry, not enough of me to go around. Please take a number."

Caller ID, a recent telephonic innovation, displays the numbers of all the calls you receive. It's handy for tracking down stalkers. You don't even need to subscribe to the Caller ID service to reap its benefits, however. For a fee, you can dial *69 immediately after a dubious call, and hear a pleasant electronic voice recite the incriminating evidence. In most cases, at least.

If Mr. Heavy Breather had the foresight to dial *67 right before calling you, his information will be "blocked," and the Robotic Phone Police will be unable to help you.

"How preposterous!" you cry. "This *67 renders *69 entirely useless."

But that's not completely true. You'd be surprised how many stalkers forget the small detail of dialing *67. Together, *67 and *69 are the sacred yin and yang of telephony, each opposing the other in perfectly equal harmony. You may dial *69 at any time after a call, but you need to actually think ahead to use the more powerful *67. It's like a game of rock-scissors-paper.

"Ha, ha! I'm going to dial *69 and get your number!"

"But I dialed *67 first! Rock breaks scissors!"

To make the game more interesting, the phone companies should allow all the other numbers to be playable, too.

"I'm dialing *725! Let's see you beat that!"

"Aw, crap! I only dialed *291!"

"Paper covers rock!"