CHAPTER 113: THE HATEFUL MAN'S GUIDE TO TELEPHONE PREPAREDNESS

Ah, the telephone!  What a marvelous age that we live in when a man or woman can use a machine to communicate with another man or woman over long distances!  Just imagine - in a hundred years, there will not be a person alive who can remember a time when the telephone did not exist! Rhetorical, snarky pause!

But, of course, making a telephone call can be a daunting task.   Even with today's speed dials, speaker phones and midi ringtones, the telephone remains an alien, unwelcoming object that lives in your home but doesn't come to your dinner table unless your are a horrible, horrible human being.   I spent countless nights in my late teens staring impotently at the telephone, wishing that I knew if I was prepared to make a telephone call, should the need ever arise.

By my mid-twenties, I began to hit my stride with my phonesmanship.   I researched the techniques of the great telephone operators of mystical Calcutta and had begun to apply these concepts to the Western mind set and began to do man kegels before I dialed.  Soon, I found myself wooing beautiful women by night and conversing with customer service representatives by day.    As soon as I had reached this enlightened state, I realized that Crom had put me on this Earth to lead mankind into a Golden Age of telephone use.  I just needed to figure out how to instruct the idiotic masses effectively.

When I was a Boy Scout, I was taught an old saying about snakes that goes "Red to yellow, kill a fellow.  Red to black, you're friendly jack."  (I have a better one.  "Don't fucking touch snakes, stupid.")  It was one of countless, stupid rhyme schemes they foisted on me to prepare me to survive after the government shits the bed and we all need to start eating snakes or something.    The 'Scouts are all about preparation.  Their motto, of course, is "Be Prediapered."  That's not a typo.  Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, wasn't just a stickler for preparedness and a long name aficionado- he was also incontinent.   Riss-Bip, as I call him, also knew that even the dullest, sweatiest, most knuckle dragging, cock eyed webelo can remember a fucking stupid rhyme.   Following Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powells example, I created a bunch of useful rhymes like "Speak before you think, they'll think your mother liked to drink" and "stop chewing gum while talking on a communications device, you fucking annoying shit-cow!  Jesus Christ!"

Now, you may be thinking This is the '90s, Matt.  Rhyming is stupid.  You're stupid, Matt.  There's no fucking way that you are going to get me to memorize some stupid rhyme about using a fucking phone.  I'm just gonna go bareback and make some calls without being prepared just to show you how stupid you really are, Stupid.

Whoa there, Fella!  Dial it back a bit before you start to dial the ol' rotary.  I wasn't going to teach you a rhyme scheme.  I was going to do an informative rap, which is a lot like rhyming, but twice as humiliating to my audience if I am related to them, but then I remembered ANAHEIM.

What is ANAHEIM, you ask?  ANAHEIM is a mnemonic I created to make preparing myself to make a phone call even more tedious.   The letters of ANAHEIM can be broken down into the following easy to remember questions and statements:

A is for "Am I high?"  The answer should be "No", because nobody wants to listen to you when you are high.

N is for "Nobody is already talking to me, right?"  Again, the answer should be "No."  If someone is already talking to you, finish your conversation before picking up a telephone.  There's nothing worse than answering a phone, only to have to listen to the person on the other end of the line talk to someone else for several seconds before they even acknowledge you.   You may also miss the part where the person answering the phone identifies himself or herself as someone other than the person you wished to be talking to, and you may proceed to then tell them about your need to purchase an all-natural cure for yeast infections in bulk for two minutes without letting them get a word in edgewise.  And that's awful.  Seriously.

A is for "Am I actually using a telephone and not, say, a package of birth control pills?"  I have made this specific mistake many, many times, as both can fold, and some of each have dials. 

H is for "Have I mastered the art of pronouncing consonants?"  Consonants are hard, I know, but they are absolutely vital for telephoning.  If you remove all the consonants from "Yes, hi, there's been a horrific xylophone accident at the opera house! Send paramedics!" all you have is "Eh, aye, eh eh a oh eh eh aye oh oh a eh eh a aw aw ow!  Eh a eh eh eh!".  Unless you are a chimp, that doesn't make a bit of sense! 

E is for "Each thing that I am about to say has a purpose or point, right?"  My friend's uncle crapped his pants while waiting in line at the Panda Express in the Dunston Mall at 6:23 PM last Thursday night and a prostitute once told me not to use the ice machine at a Travel Lodge in Cleveland because she'd seen someone vomit into it.  Anyway, what does your father's favorite 1970s porn star like to eat?  See?  That's really fucking cloying.

I is for "I am not driving a motor vehicle."  That's not a question.  That's a statement.  If you are driving a motor vehicle, please focus on operating your motor vehicle before you kill someone.

M is for "Mnemonics ending in Mnemonic are dumb as fuck because the M is silent, fuck nuts."

I attempted to patent my ANAHEIM system a few years ago, but I got bored.  Patenting is boring.  Anyway, if you can remember ANAHEIM (seriously, how can anyone forget fabulous Anaheim?), you probably are ready to attempt a telephoning.