How I became obnoxious

On the advice of a PR guy, I had just bought a cell phone. First one I ever had. I hate it.

I never even had a pager, back when those things existed: premature electronic sperm of the devil.

Someone tried to give me a pager once, 37 years ago, and I refused it.

“Here,” said the editor at the paper that had just hired me, handing me a pager. “Now our readers can call you with news tips 24 hours a day.”

“No, thanks,” I said, handing it back. “I’d rather they call you24 hours a day.”

Years later, after worming my way up at another daily newspaper that no longer exists, I quit my job as editorial page editor, because I knew they were about to make me endorse George W. Bush to the 95,000 subscribers of our households. So I quit.

This has little to do, really, with my hatred of cell phones, but I knew that if I wrote what the publisher told me to, I would hate myself for the rest of my life. So I landed a job at another newspaper, whose bosses never told me what to write, and I was happy. For a while.

If you live in my country, the (formerly United) States of America, I don’t have to tell you why I hate Comcast. For six years it was named one of the worst companies in America, by consumer magazines and trustworthy pollsters. In 2017, PC Magazine called it the most-hated company in America. And, man, that’s going some.

“The public distaste for Comcast historically stems from its effective monopolies in major markets, notoriously difficult cancellation processes, frequent price hikes, and poor customer service ratings,” according to Yahoo! Finance.

Boy, I’ll say.

So I canceled my contract and went elsewhere. And — do you know what? They all but gave me a flip phone! And lower monthly rates! And — prepare yourself — I hate the new guys too! But most of all, I hate their flip phone.

So anyway, to move on from this rant, I was in a doctor’s waiting room the other day when my cell phone rang. It buzzed and jiggled on my leg, like a baby rattlesnake.

The other people in the waiting room looked at me, a cell phone virgin, is if to say: “What’s the matter with you? Answer your damn phone.”

So I did. But because I’m new at this, and the cell phone ain’t very good, I had to sort of … umm … scream into the phone, to answer a “few simple questions” about how I liked their cell phone.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like a roomful of strangers staring at me, as though I’d just done something wrong.

But I understood those hostile glares. So I closed up the phone, shutting it off, and — praise god for small favors — as I did so, a woman emerged from the back offices and said, “Mr. Kahn?”

I got out of that waiting room quicker’n ham ‘n’ cheese on a bagel. But as I left toward my diagnosis, I wanted to turn ‘round toward all them ‘t’others in the room and explain: “It’s not my fault! I hate this phone. They made me do it!”

But, no, theydidn’t. I did it to myself. I bought a g.d. cell phone and carried it around in my pocket. And answered it.

As the door to the waiting room closed behind me, with a pneumatic hiss, I wondered how, or if, I could apologize to those 16 people in the waiting room, glad, no doubt, to see me go.