Today in Profiles in Pick-up Basketball, we examine...
Profiles In Pick-up Basketball: The Guy Who Won’t Get Off The Phone
...the guy who interrupts the game for a phone call and won’t hang up. Read on.
If I am to make a habit of broadcasting my personal weaknesses for public consumption, I may as well do the same for my strengths: I have a profound ability to not answer a telephone when it rings. I observe in others an almost creepy allegiance to social expectations. They will answer a phone while in the middle of a conversation, or while driving in the middle of a complicated and chaotic traffic scenario, or, worst of all, while playing basketball.
Unless you are expecting a) a birth in the family or b) an NBA team to draft you, you have absolutely no business answering a phone. I would like to personally guarantee you, right here and now, that the call is not important. If it is, I will write you a check for a million billion dollars, which is all of the money that I have.
But if you’re the individual I’m talking about, you’ll ignore this. You’ll interrupt the game. The call will be of absolutely zero real importance, and the rest of us will be left to pass the time with conversation.
And as time passes, our conversations will grow more and more ridiculous.
We wait...
...and wait...
...and wait until we halt conversation and realize that you’re still on the phone because you’re an oblivious no-count dummy with no regard for the desires of others. Who knows what the Hell you’re talking about? Who cares?
Eventually, everyone gives up on finishing the game...
...but I will begrudginGly admit that some terrific conversations took place that otherwise may never have happened. “Waiting for your idiot friend to get off the phone so you can keep playing” is a very special zone, one detached from the baggage of context and worry. It fosters the conversations we’re supposed to have at coffee shops, but don’t. So as much of a tool of a non-person you may be, you still deserve our gratitude.
See More:
