Thanks for the Call Yesterday

The telephone!  I can't tell you how important the telephone was for me when I was getting sober.  In fact, for most of my sobriety it has been very important.  Like most alcoholics I lived an isolated life emotionally, keeping things inside, thinking about them and thinking and thinking and thinking.  So it really helped to be able to talk to someone every day.  And not just at meetings, as important as they are to me, but with one person for a more extended period of time.  It's harder to bullshit someone when you talk one-on-one for 15 minutes or so.  I can do it, no doubt, but it's harder.  I have also learned not to put too much significance on every call.  I don't have to have some big issue to discuss when I picked up the phone.  Often I'll shoot the shit with someone for a bit and he'll ask: "So everything going OK?" and if it was, we'd ring off.  The point was that when I needed to talk to someone I had that muscle memory of picking up the phone.

This is not the case so much any more.  People don't generally use the phone to . . . you know . . . talk to people, preferring texting where one can hide behind bland, vague words decorated with clever little emojis.  Oh, well, so be it.  We all get older, right?  I don't ever want to be one of those old guys who is constantly telling everyone how much better it was in the day.  "When I was getting sober we didn't have coffee - we just took a mouthful of Sanka crystals and we chewed on those, and we liked it, goddammit."  That kind of stuff.

A few years ago a colleague asked me to be his sponsor and then promptly, with alacrity, never called me, not once, not ever.  I rang him up a couple of times - to grease the lines of communication - but he didn't ring me back, not once, not ever.  As an ex-salesman who did not receive return phone calls like 47 million times this is one of the things I DO NOT tolerate in The Program.  I'm not mad about it - I get it why millions of people wouldn't want to talk to me - but I don't put up with it.  I delete the contact from my phone and I move on, with absolutely no feelings of ill will.  If you don't want to talk to me on the phone I absolutely respect that.

I received a surprising call from him a few weeks ago.  When we spoke I could tell he had a lot of things going on that were upsetting - a rapidly accelerating engagement, health issues, and the like.  So I decided that - since he really seemed to need to talk - that I'd pick up the phone and try to reignite the relationship.  I called and he didn't call back.  D'oh!  I felt a little like Charlie Brown whiffing on the football kick.

The next day he walked past me on the way into the meeting.

"Thanks for the call yesterday," he said, cheerily.

I kept a straight face.  He is under the impression that a phone call is one-sided.  He's 70.  He's not going to change.

Then, today, at the meeting, he raised his hand during a business-related conversation about updating our phone list.

"I just wanted to say that if you call me and don't leave your name, then I'm not calling back," he proclaimed.  

I almost laughed out loud.  I almost pointed out that he isn't going to call you back if you leave your name, either, but I'm firmly against cross talk.

Delete.