I was standing at the counter behind the cash register. “Hello?” someone said. It startled me, I’m not ashamed to say. I knew no one was in the store.
It was assumed that no one was under the counter. That’s where the voice came from. I looked down.
“Hello?” I replied, after some hesitation.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m here,” I answered. “Where are you?”
“Here.”
Good thing we got that settled. Except it wasn’t really. Where was here? The voice was coming from under the cash register, down with the boxes and bags and stuff. It seemed to come from the paper shredder and I thought of K95FM.
When I worked there, the transmitter, all 100,000 watts of it, was on the top floor of the Liberty Towers condos. People who lived there could pick up their favorite country hits on their toaster, dishwasher, or electric toothbrush. The condo-owners sued. The transmitter got moved. Maybe it had been moved again – to somewhere near my shredder.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to find you,” I answered. “Keep talking.”
“Have you lost your phone or something?”
The phone. I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know why not, really. At the moment, I was trusting my ears and the probability that her voice was rising up out of the paper shredder. Come to think of it, where is that darn cellphone?
It wasn’t in any of the regular spots, and as I made myself lower to get better reception on the shredder, my hand bumped the front of my pants. The phone was in my pocket. Ah, I thought, the phone has gone sentient. Calling people on its own now.
I finished the conversation out, speaker-phone style – since I don’t know how to change it without hanging up, or clicking off, or whatever it’s called these days. Disconnecting, I guess. I’m disconnecting now, I said, frivolously.
Time to read the manual and figure out how the phone sends its voice through the paper shredder.