The Early Posthumous Work

Random Telephone

159 Random Telephone The telephone sits on the table like a small black dog. Perhaps you have a green, red, yellow, or white individual. Do not stare at the telephone because pretty soon it will look to you like a small dog, and one that is about to jump—on or at you. In this respect the telephone is like a poodle, dachshund, or other small dog that jumps around, wiggles, yaps, and slobbers, generally making a person very uncomfortable unless the person is the dog’s owner. There is something in the master-dog relationship which enables the master figure to endure and even overlook an incredible amount of wiggling, slobbering, etc. Love, I suppose. We must first distinguish between the telephone and the telephone company. The telephone company is roundly disliked by a great many people. It is a company, after all, and companies in general come in for a lot of dislike. The telephone company like any company is an abstract organizational principle put into effect by individuals, its employees. It is the only phone company in town. It has stockholders and long lines. The individuals who put the principle into effect are of diverse character but submit to at least one generalization. The individuals who install and service the equipment—those who drive trucks and climb poles—are in general pleasant, agreeable people. The ones who occupy the “business office” generally are 160 The Early Posthumous Work not. There are, of course, reasons. But the pleasantness and unpleasantness are greater than that justified by the reasons. There is a third class of employee, the operator class, which suffers the abuse and ill will generated by the “business office” in the great American public. This is unfortunate, because the operators are often quite congenial. They are congenial in the face of the (easily intuited) threat of losing their jobs should they do something unseemly, like laugh. What with the breakdown of institutions, this type of raucous behavior is becoming more common. I recently had a very pleasant conversation with an operator on the merits of Austin’s “gold building” (it appealed to me, but not to her). For many years I have heard people express their dislike of the company. I have heard artfully rendered accounts of their conflicts with the company. The company always came out on the short end. I cannot gather the energy to defend the company; I do not like it much either. The only thing I can see to suggest about the company is to dissolve it and find some other abstract organizational principle to put in its place. This new principle would have as its philosophical origin the idea that how long some person talks to another person should in no way be affected by how much money they have. This principle would have as its goal giving away the equipment and the capabilities of the equipment. This principle would maintain the practice of sending out telephone bills because the bills are handsome and it’s nice to get mail. There’ll be no more of this silliness about paying, however. I feel certain that if those undeniably brilliant types at Bell Labs could be put on the problem, they could come up with such a principle and put it into operation. Lickety-split. So much for the company. The telephone itself sits by the desk (on the floor, in the nook, on the hall table), looking for all the world as if it is about to start jumping, wiggling, yapping, and slobbering. It is not, of course. All it will do is ring. The ringing can make you nervous, depending on your proximity and your personality. But this anxiety is minimized by reaching around Steven Barthelme 161 under to the serrated wheel next to the “loud” arrow and turning it backward. (Recall, if you will, that in cartoons a ringing telephone is shown jumping, wiggling, and shaking.) Which fails to bring us to the telephone and the concept of the hero. There are two ways in which the telephone bears relation to the concept of the hero. The first is that the telephone encourages hero formation. The telephone enables a great many people to talk to a great many others very easily. They talk about themselves or other people. Since a hero is created by some people talking about other people, or more precisely, one other person, the...