You Can’t Ring & Ruin My Life!

Remember those days of carefree indulgence back in college or school or
even the womb? You could do whatever you wished without anyone bothering
you or asking you irritating questions. Life was so beautiful, with little
misery to discover and a lot of fun to explore. Then, some idiot went and
invented the mobile phone.

It’s bad enough to have one phone, but when you try to adhere to statistics
(India has almost a 200% cell-phone penetration), you get stuck with two
phones and a very short fuse. Constantly trying to please every one of the
900-odd contacts on both phones, most of whom just give you a missed call
hoping you consider them important enough for you to call back, can be
quite a challenge if you’re not taking anger management classes.

When I have full credit balance, the mobile battery is low. When the
Battery is fully charged, the credit balance is low. When battery and
Balance are fully available, mobile network is down….

Outgoing calls are less and incoming sales calls are a lot. Sales companies
pester you with calls and when you lose your cool, you are expected to talk
with respect and manners. I’ve always wondered the concept before/during
the call that says “Kindly note, your call may be recorded or monitored for
quality and training purposes”. I had my own version of the same when some
sales person call me “Kindly note your call may be abused or cut for mental
quality and gaining purposes”

Cell phone becomes very common nowadays; almost every one of us has cell
phone. You may know that cell phone also create radiation when it is in
used. This radiation will harm our health especially our brain when we
close the cell phone to our ear. And if you’re saved by its radiation, the
ring tone will kill you.

Imagine a scenario during a serious office meeting. Everybody is pretending
to be attentive, the mood is tense and then suddenly a mobile rings “Last
Christmas” by George Micheal. This is indeed what happened in one of our
meetings. Unfortunately the guy whose mobile rang had to spend the next
Christmas at home.

This morning, I had the (mis)fortune of running out of balance on my
prepaid number and reach the end of the month’s grace period on my postpaid
one, and at 9 in the morning, I was ‘temporarily disconnected’ from the
entire world. It was such a beautiful feeling – I became nostalgic and went
up on the terrace, placed both my phones in front of me and danced around
in my shorts singing ‘It’s My Life’ and screaming,

                    “You can’t ring and ruin my life!
                    You can’t ring and ruin my life!
                             I control you!
                            Tra-la-la-laaa….
                You can’t ring… You can’t ruin my life…”

Just as the chorus built up a bit and I became more and more animated, one
of the phones beeped. I stopped mid-sentence, “I contr” and stared at the
pair of life-ruiners in front of me. One of them definitely had beeped. Was
I dreaming? I went closer, slowly, hesitantly, and saw that my Motorola
phone was flashing “1 New Message”.

How could this be? I knew for a fact that there was no balance in either of
the phones. I couldn’t receive messages! This was not possible! Then, it
struck me that if this phone could receive messages, then what’s stopping
it from ringing! I let out a guttural scream of pain, grabbed both the
phones and ran inside. When I flipped the phone open, the message was from
my boss and it read, “Robin, can’t reach you. Please call.”

I felt like a moron as I stood in line, trying to recharge both the phones,
a few hours later.