I don’t like the phone.
Okay, that’s not exactly accurate. I’m generally fine when I’m actually talking on the phone, but I hate calling people. On the rare occasion I have to do it for work, I have to rehearse exactly what I’ll say before I dial; ditto for when I need to call my doctor or bank or whatever. But it isn’t just calls to strangers that make me nervous. I’m bad about calling friends; I’m happy to just chat, but I feel weird about calling people just to chat, because what if they were in the middle of something?
I mean, presumably, they’d say, “Hey, can I call you back later?” but that’s the point. This is me being neurotic, not a rational thing.
So I generally never call anyone unless I have a specific reason, along the lines of a birthday/relevant news/whatever. Which means there are a lot of people who never hear from me and I have a bunch of friendships that have basically vanished due to my social awkwardness and inability to stay in touch. But that’s not actually what I mean to write here.
Basically, I discovered a new low of the “I can’t call, because I might be interrupting something,” spectrum lat night. See, I’ve never liked to call to order food. Some of that was just being baffled by the concept in college, because in the very small town where I grew up, well, delivery didn’t exist. Not a single restaurant would send people all the way out to where I lived, and there wasn’t a single place in town itself. So the idea of calling a restaurant and having it send the food to me was pretty foreign, but hey, neat! But in college, I generally made someone else call. After college, though. I live in New York. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of places I can call and have them give me food, and since I’m not much of a cook (where “not much of a cook” means “if it was financially feasible I would eat out for every single meal and turn the kitchen into an office or something”) getting food delivered is awesome.
But last night, it was just me, home alone. I decided I wanted some quesadillas, and wouldn’t you know, I had a delivery menu from a well-reviewed little place a few blocks away. Everything on menupages said the food was good, the service speedy, and the prices super-cheap. Awesome. But it took me a good 20 minutes to work up to calling, because, of course, I didn’t want to really bother anyone. I mean, it was just food for one person! Was it really worth it to send someone to bring it to me, when I was just a few blocks away? Seriously, I didn’t want to bother anyone, I just wanted a small meal…
Luckily, I eventually remembered that delivering food is someone’s job, even if it is food for one, and to somebody nearby. But wow. That was a moment of revelation there.
Absolutely unrelated to anything: at work recently, we’ve begun doing semi-weekly videos. Guess who gets to play anchorwoman on a semi-regular basis? This is the closest I’ve come to using my journalism degree.
