Ring Tones

I've been somewhat driven the last few years. Driven by things that sort of wiggled themselves into my daily routine as necessities. I can't tell you when I added most of them, when I stopped wondering if I could afford them, or when they became so ingrained they also became somewhat invisible. Cell phone, PDA, home fax, second telephone line, second, third, or fourth computer, digital camera, digital video camera, you know, the constant progression, the constant stream of 'things'.

One of those 'things' has been the package I selected years ago for my telephone service. Call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, three-way conferencing and a few other features I have never used. One that I thought was invaluable, a true life saver, a busy person's friend, was the ID benefit. Knowing who was calling and being able to determine if now was a good time to take that call seemed so utterly vogue in the beginning, but before long it became something else, a means of discriminating, short changing, even dodging people and things. Ingrained and invisible, unknown to me, it had also become an issue of great stress.

I might not have realized that had not something happened, some snafu, some malfunction, that zapped my caller ID system about a week ago. At first I was like, 'oh, no,' now what do I do? And, of course, day one I let most calls roll over to voice mail so identity could be established and I could make that ever so important decision to talk or not to talk.

Day two, nothing was more important than getting that ever loving thing fixed. Only, I got busy, and I forgot until it was too late to sit on the telephone for an hour waiting to talk to someone about getting it resolved. Day three, because there were a couple of significant calls I was waiting on, I started to answer the telephone -- without benefit of pre-knowledge. By day four, I felt a subtle change taking place in my life. It was a change linked to expectation and excitement. It was a return to the thrill of the unknown - simple as that - the unknown thrill of not having the foggiest notion who was on the other end of the telephone when I lifted that receiver.

So, what else have I jockeyed myself out of by just falling into rhythm with the drone of the world? I don't know, but I think I'm going to give myself a chance to find out. Heck, I might even go outside the next time it rains, get myself a small shovel and play in the mud. I used to make a dynamic mud pie. Might be time to go back to that starting gate and work my way back this way again.