The cellphone I bought three years ago was doing fine. I replaced its battery twice, and did not misplace it even once. My executive assistant Maya disagreed, “You do misplace it. But, it remains there because nobody wants to lift an ancient cell.” She had lost hers six times already at company cost. Too embarrassed to let me carry the three year old antique, she presented a new cellphone to me on my birthday, and debited the cost to my personal account.

I relayed the three year obsolescence trend to my wife, the fifty year old model I carry for the last thirty years. She rebuked that it was indeed more boring for her to carry a still older model for thirty years.

My cellphone-related ambition was limited only to make and receive calls. Maya used hers to send SMS messages, forward jokes, download ringtones, listen to music, click pictures and chat endlessly with a million boyfriends. I did none of these. This was one more source of Maya’s irritation. Yet another was the factory-set ringtone of my phone. She changed it to a hot remix number. For the entire next week, I ignored all my calls. It took another week to recognize them as mine. I did not know how to restore the original ringtone. Maya did it in exchange of a promise that I would master at least one lifesaving function like essemessing, or downloading music, or clicking pictures.

“Just send an SMS ‘reached’ when you land in New York. Migraine murders your wife’s entire next day when you wake her up in the middle of a night just to confirm that you are still alive. SMS is simple, fast, cheap, peaceful, and healthy,” she praised the invention, and recorded some standard messages as templates in my phone, such as, ‘i luv u’, ‘cu 2nite’, ‘4gv me’, ‘lots of hak’. I needed ‘flight 3 hours late’, ‘don’t wait for dinner’, ‘withdraw cash from ATM’, ‘send car to airport’.     

On reaching New York, I got an SMS from Maya. I wrote it down carefully: ‘no1 2 c u n ny. go 2 la 8 1ce 4 911 mtg 2moro. atb’ and rushed to the nearest McDonald’s. I promised a chav there to buy him a Big Mac if he decoded the SMS. He did it in a jiffy and wrote down: ‘No one to see you in New York. Go to Los Angeles at once for emergency meeting tomorrow. All the best.’ The wonderboy gave me his cell number for regular service, and in exchange of a Coke taught me how to forward an SMS.

Maya congratulated me when she learnt that I could now forward SMSs. But, she could not figure out why I always responded to my calls myself. “Excuse me! Why do they offer messaging capability? Use it.” She advised.

“Tell me, why do you insist that I carry this cellphone everywhere?”

“So that you are accessible 24x7.”

“Then why shouldn’t I always answer the calls myself?”

“Because messaging service is free in the deal.” She shot back instinctively. The hip hypocrisy surfaced later, “But, how can you let the whole world know that you are always free to take their calls?”

“I am not free to take their calls. This phone rings when I am in the midst of a serious deadlock in an important meeting. Your bizarre jingles embarrass me no end. Why do you keep on changing the ringtone every week?”

“Not every week. Every day. When you go to the rest room. In fact, you must fix different ringtones for different callers. The tune itself will tell you whether the call is from your wife, boss, boss’s wife…”

“Boss’s wife never calls me.” Why should that old lady disturb me?

“OK, we won’t have a separate ringtone for her, then.”

“Don’t complicate my life further with twenty jingles on my phone.”

“Twenty? Why only twenty? Your new cell can store ninety nine.”

“Listen! With great difficulty I can remember one. That’s enough for me. You still haven’t answered my original question.”

“What was it?”

“Why shouldn’t I answer my calls myself? And, make no mistake; I am not always free to take calls.”

“But, the callers feel so when you come on the line straightaway. In fact, they tease me privately. I feel so ashamed.” Maya was in tears. I was afraid that she would plead with the HRD for a change of boss. She wiped off her tears, and continued to brainwash me, “You must let the calls go to your voice mailbox. Don’t be accessible directly. When you answer yourself, they think that we have no other client. They may not like to do business with a one-client firm. We must pose to be busy up to our nose.”

“But, we are actually busy. We have many clients. All know that.”

“At the most, you can take the boss’s calls. And you wife’s, if you wish! But, if you ask me, your wife is the first one to whom you should pretend to be busy 24x7. Forward her calls to the mailbox. Then only she will learn to respect you.”

Wow! Maya already knew a home secret.

But, I did not report this to my wife. Maintaining peace on this planet and particularly at home is my topmost priority.

	Web useless-knowledge.com