Phones and Friends

Where would we be without cell phones? You know that awful feeling when your battery dies and you're incommunicado for a few hours? Imagine having that feeling ALL THE TIME… yeah I couldn't either. Remember back to before we had cell phones? You had all of your friends phone numbers memorized and you can probably still remember them today. Remember calling their house and having to ask if they were home, which of course led to some small talk with their family. If they were out you had to wait till they got back home and then you had to rely on a family member to pass on the message to them, which was a dicey at best probability. If the friend’s mom took down the number, there was a 85% rate of return phone call; father 65%; Older sister 57%; Younger sister 34%; Older brother 23%; Younger brother 9%. Other than knowing that your friend will never call you back if the little bro picked up, the other thing that sucked about younger brother answering the phone was the horrible start to the convo that always ensued.

Brother: Hello?
You: Oh, hi Mrs. Johnson, is Brandon there?
Brother: it's Tyler.
You: sorry dude. (beat passes) is Brandon home?
It sucks because you know you've ruined this kid's day, and you know just what it was like to be confused for mom answering the phone at some point.

Back to the point, which is, we're lucky we are in our 20's so we didn't have to deal with the lack of a cell phone in our lives for too long. When you are younger you don't need a cell phone quite as much anyway because you'd see your friends all day at school and make plans with them to meet at the field to play football or come over to play some XBOX after school. But how did people carry out plans in the olden days?

If you wanted to meet up with someone on a Friday night, you had to tell them exactly the time and place? Bup that. What if the place you were going to sucked and you wanted to leave, or you were running late, or you wanted to give them a lame excuse and do something different? You couldn't. People must have just been waiting for each other, hoping that they showed when and where they said they would, all the time.

If you HAD to change something, you had to use—gulp—the pay phone. Remember that germ infested contraption? We 20-somethings are still old enough to have used those things. Does calling your parent in 8th grade to pick you up from the movies ring any bells? Remember dialing collect? You know you were way too cheap to throw in that quarter, so you billed your parents the $2.00 phone call instead. But you could dodge all this by beating the system. When that operator asked you to speak your name after the tone, you knew your name ceased to be (fill in name here) and suddenly it was, "Pick-us-up-at-5."

Anyway, not having a cell phone would make life inconvenient to say the least. But, it would pose an even bigger problem for two kinds of friends, Flakey Friend and Wasted Friend.

Your flaky friend is always sending you a text 20 min after you were supposed to meet up saying how their back is itchy so they can't make it tonight, but definitely next time! And you know that is bull but it's your flaky friend, so you half expect it anyways. Somehow this person is your friend, even though you never see them. Well, without cell phones Flaky Friend must have not existed. After all, Flaky Friend and you get by purely on this form of "I can't make it" communication. This is what's holding the friendship together with scotch tape.

When you and Flaky Friend do finally meet up, it's almost a letdown because that means you've lost an internal bet. Now you have to hang out with FF, and that's no good either. Some laughs are had, but the only reason why you're friends in the first place is because you're always planning to see each other. When you actually see each other it's awkward. Ironically, it's the cell phone that gets you out of having to spend a whole evening with FF, so you can go hang out with one of your other friends, Wasted Friend, Sort-of Gay Friend, Sports Friend, or Movie Friend. But if you cannot get in touch with those people, it crosses your mind to turn to Work/School Friend, but there's no way you can take that step with them.

Wasted Friend: When you go out to the bar scene or a party one of your friends is bound to get wasted by the end of the night and you usually get a drunken phone call or you call him 15 times and finally find out that he's lying in the back yard staring at the sky. You go grab him to leave, but what if he didn't have a cell phone? Have you ever tried to track someone down whose phone is dead? Pretty impossible. Well if it’s 3 a.m. on a Friday and the last time you saw them was at the party on Rocky Rd and they're no where to be seen there anymore, they're in trouble. Short of roaming the streets with a flood light and yelling their name, getting in touch with them isn't happening, and now Wasted Friend has turned into Drunken Missing Friend. In fact, not only would you not be able to find them that night in this pre-cell phone world, you wouldn't even have proof of life until they make it back to their land-line phone and called you at your house. Sure they could have used a pay phone, but what are the chances that the waste case is going to have a few quarters in their pocket, or remember the numbers 800-COLLECT. He's up the creek without a cell phone, and he'll be there for a while.

Here’s just a list of the other friends that are in your phone's memory:

Sort-of Gay Friend (SGF): This friend is pretty self-explanatory. This is the guy that's never afraid of touching anyone. You're at the party and he starts putting his hands all up on your shoulder, before anyone has drunk anything. He's the guy that's not afraid of giving his other friends a pseudo-backrub. He's also the guy that looks good all the time. You've never seen him wearing anything but button-down shirts, never a dingy football jersey. He's the guy who wears the polo shirt to the baseball game.

Sports/Movie Friend: These friends essentially specialize in one thing, movies or sports. Movie friend is the one you always see movies with. You never do anything else with that friend. What's more, they'll see anything. The great thing about Movie Friend is you really don’t even need to get along with this person at all or have anything in common with them. You call or text them to asking what time they want to see the movie and the next time you see them is at the theater, where you talk about how excited you are to see the movie and how you read good or bad reviews about it. When you tell MF that your friend (really, you’re true friend) saw the movie and said it was good, MF is still skeptical because Peter Travers’ review in Rolling Stone said it was below average.

After the movie, conversation only stays on one topic: the movie. Including a conversation that goes something like this:
You: That was awesome
MF: yeah it was solid
You: my favorite part was when the pencil went in the guy’s head.
MF: yeah I liked the part when the commissioner came back to life.
(on and on that goes until you can think of no more parts of the film so that MF thinks of the last thing).
In reality, a stranger would suffice, but you don’t want to go to the movies by yourself, and that’s why you have movie friend.

Sports Friend is the guy you only talk about sports to. In fact, there might as well not be any other thing in the world besides sports. This is the friend that when you ask if they're dating someone, they say, "No, I've struck out." It's probably because they spend all their time adjusting their fantasy team. One trait sports fan always has is that he loves the high five. This friend is perfect to go to a sports bar with, or even have over to watch the game, but the range of sports guy pretty much runs out there. He's like a lefty specialist in baseball, really good at doing what you keep them around for, but if you keep them around too long, it’s only going to turn bad.

Work/School Friend: Wherever you spend most of your time (Work or Classes) there's always people who are designated friends for these places ONLY. You may talk to them all day, all week even, but when you leave on Friday, there's no way you're seeing that person until Monday morning. That's not because they're a bad person, rather because they're stuck in the work/school friend zone. Work is what you talk about with them because it is your common bond. "Did you see the new memo?" "How did you do on that test?" "Who's the new guy?" These are the questions you concern yourself with daily to break the ice with work friend. "How was your weekend?" is also very popular, because you know there's no way Work Friend knows how your weekend was because there's zero chance they were there too. You may divulge into other topics of course, television, movies, sports, etc, but those are all talked about at lunch or in shorter, "Cliff Notes" versions at the person's desk or at the infamous water cooler.

Long Drive Friend: This the friend you turn to when you're making that 2-hour drive from point A to B. You call them because when they answer they don’t say things like, "why are you calling?" They say things like, “I haven’t talked to you since Tuesday.” You don’t need a reason to call this friend other than that you are bored. Its a symbiotic relationship, because they call you when they are bored, too. These aren’t the friends that you call just to tell them one thing quickly, you have to text them in that situation, because when you dial up Long Drive Friend, your signing up for at least 20 min of talk time. These conversations can cover anything and everything and they usually do, you don’t really even care what you’re talking about as long as you keep on talking because anything is better than just driving. The only problem that you run into with Long Drive Friend is when you reach your destination. The conversation hasn’t come to a good ending point, because it never really does, it just goes on and on, you need to find that spot to pinch it off. You can try making crackling noises with your mouth or a piece of paper and say your losing service, you can outright hang up and pretend you lost service or you can sit at your destination and keep talking but the best and easiest way to do it is just throw in the "dude i just got to ____ i gotta run" and they'll understand because they know what they are there for and they just put in another good days work on the other end of the line.

The Thank God for Caller ID Friend: Before cell phones and caller ID this friend was the most annoying person on the planet, always calling you to do stuff that you didn’t want to do but you did because you couldn’t come up with a quick enough excuse. Well caller ID put an end to this friend, you might as well enter their name in your phone as Voicemail because that’s exactly where their call is going. Thanks to the combination of caller id and voice mail you will always be prepared for this friend. You let it go to voice mail and listen to them asking if you wanted to go to the carnival with them this weekend, then you compose yourself with a good excuse and call them back a few hours later. You tell them that you didn’t even listen to the voice mail, you were away from your phone and saw the missed call and called them right away, when they then ask if you want to go to the carnival, your excused is locked and loaded.
“No, man, sorry. I’ve gotta shine shoes this weekend… I know, it sounds weird, but it’s got to be done.”

These are inevitably some of the people taking up space on your phone's memory, which is a good thing, because otherwise you’d have to remember their info yourself. You’ve got better things to use your memory for, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex measured up to 42 feet.