Re: Hanging on the Telephone
Posted by: Anonymous User (---.dalect01.va.comcast.net)
Date: August 12, 2003 03:13PM
Ptolly's post reminded me of something that happened when I was in high school.
I lived in the country and we had a party line (meaning 2 houses shared the same phone line even though we had different numbers. Their's would ring once, ours would ring twice) and if you picked up the phone while the other house was talking you could hear them.
Well, this couple was a pretty quiet couple who kept mostly to themselves, but we knew that the man had a pretty volitile temper. Well, being a teenager, I was always on the phone with my girlfriends and so I invariably picked up on the neighbors frequently. And one day, I happened to pick up while he had apparently picked a fight with his wife and she was holding the phone like she was going to call the police.
So they argued and argued- a quite interesting fight about how he thought she had let the dog drink out of his coffee cup when he put it down and then didn't tell him when he took another drink out of it. So I'd put the phone down, come back 15 minutes later and they're still arguing...another 15 minutes, still arguing. Well, apparently, after a while the phone was put down but not hung up....and the arguing had progressed onto something completely *different* (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
And of course, by this time, my best friend had ridden her bike over to my house to see why I hadn't called. So, of course, we listened in... almost 3 hours worth of "completely different"!!! Much giggling and face making ensued on our end of the phone line!
The neighbors finally figured out the phone wasn't on the hook when the guy went to grab his cigarrettes that he couldn't initially find but eventually found on the table next to the phone. And he heard us giggling on the other end! He had the audacity to yell at us! So I told him very boldly that if he was going to tie up our phone for nearly 4 hours that he might as well be entertaining! And with that I hung up.
From then on, he never could look me in the face. Priceless!