Idiocy - a parable

My boss generally does the scheduling for new jobs and fields call for any problems with current ones.

That is, when he's there. He took off last Thursday for an annual fishing trip with his dad. That makes me, and one of the drivers, responsible for fielding all calls and making sure that we are able to cover any given work related issues that arise.

Last friday I bought some lunch, but couldn't eat it all. At the end of the day I gathered all of my things and headed out the door.

Flash forward 2 hours. A strange beeping sound keeps occuring in our house. My wife and I ignore it for a time, thinking it's one of our son's toys. But it's too insistent. We split up and canvas the house, trying to find the source. We finally realize that it's coming from the refridgerator. We huddle around, and I open the door. The beeping is much louder, and it's obvious that the sound is coming from inside. I stick my head in and realize that one of the lights has burned out. I ask my wife "What's it trying to tell us? Is it that the light is out?" My wife responds "And when will it shut up? Will it keep going off until the light is changed?"

The door still open, I start looking at the service-call number, prepared to interrogate the keep-it-cool company and ask what it means when the fridge is beeping. Suddenly my wife says "You know, it sounds just like a Nextel!" To which I respond "Oh shit, it is!"

I had left the cell-phone in the bag with my leftover lunch.

My wife was laughing so hard in the background that she almost threw up, while I was trying to field a serious call about tomorrow's schedule.

To add insult to injury, my son got ahold of the phone 10 minutes later and hit the "page" button, basically redialing the number of the person that I had just spoken to. This time even I was laughing as I tried to explain that I wasn't really calling him, and apologized again that he had been trying to page me for 15 minutes while we figured out where the noise was coming from.

The lesson here? Until the Jetson's future, your refridgerator will not alert you to trouble with a repeating beep sound. If you have isolated a sound coming from your fridge, it is likely a cell phone, toy or the radio signals from the meat, way in the back, that has evolved 1950's technology.

And don't let your son play with your work cell phone.