Had a weird phonecall moment yesterday. I went to call Fliss on my desk phone at work, quickly dialing in the familiar number on the keypad and placing the receiver to my ear… as you do.
I heard the pip-pa-ra-pip sounds you get when a nearby mobile phone is receiving a call or message, and glancing down at my mobile I saw that I had an incoming call on that. The phone I had dialed on the desk phone started ringing then too.
Thinking quickly, I decided to keep on with the desk phone call and answer my mobile at the same time. Sometimes Fliss and I have this uncanny knack of e-mailing each other at the same time during a working day, so I figured that she might be calling me on my mobile as I was calling her on the phone at home.
I pressed answer on the mobile and lifted it to my left ear. At the same time the ringing on the receiver of the desk phone also stopped. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t figure out that I had dialed my own number – it seems pretty obvious now.
“Hello?” I said. The hello went into the microphones of both the desk phone receiver and the mobile, and raced across the networks to their respective ears on my head. I was kind of startled at hearing my own voice come out of both the ear pieces, but instantly realised what I’d done.
I did try to stifle my laughter, but when I could hear myself stifling the laughter in time-shifted stereo it only served to make me laugh properly. Hearing that was even funnier, but I felt stupid at this point and decided to hang up on myself.
I recently treated myself to the box set of the TwilightZone tv series from 1985 – the first episode of which features Bruce Willis as a man who calls himself by accident. If that episode is anything to go by, doing that kind of thing can have terrible consequences – I was lucky to get away with it! ;o)
