I'll get it!

As a father of teenagers, I think its time to propose a new event for the Olympics... the phone sprint. After all, there doesn't seem to be much else that hasn't turned into an Olympic event. We can all be sitting on the sofa enjoying a rerun of Friends and should the phone ring, well, let's just say I don't want to be in the path between the phone and my kids. If you are lucky, only one of them will dash toward the phone or you are likely to get caught in the crossfire between two or more siblings. I can't in recent memory recall seeing anything move so fast. With a shout of "I'll get it," or "Its for me," a teenager will run toward the phone with such speed as to suggest that the caller would hang up if, God forbid, the phone rang more than twice.

Now I consider myself a fairly hip parent. I try to be both a parent and friend to my kids but this phone madness drives me nuts. I try and think back to myself as a teenager. Granted, times and technology were a little different. I had limitations on the use of the phone and, go figure, my parents could actually enforce them. Remember when a three-minute egg timer had a whole different purpose? Call waiting, forwarding, conferencing, etc., were nowhere close to being available in the home. I guess the times they are a changing.

I could handle the phone ringing off the hook if these teenagers would exercise some consideration for the people they are calling. True story, a teenager calls my house at 3 a.m. and asks for my daughter, who was 16 at the time. It's a school night. I think the conversation went something like this:

"Hello." (me half asleep)
"Hey man, is Julie home?" (not her real name)
"Do you know what time it is?" (me, waking up and testing basic intelligence)
"Yea man, it's a little late but she told me to call her tonight, so is she, like home?" (obviously missed the point of my asking the time question)
"Well, whether or not Julie is home is not the issue here, she can't take calls at this hour." (me, wide awake now and losing patience)
"Dude, you don't have to get an attitude." (slams phone)

This person proceeded to call three more times over the next hour, each time hanging up when I answered the phone. I finally unplugged it. I wish this was uncommon but it's not. I have curfews on phone calls and my kids even tell people they can't take calls after a certain hour but it doesn't matter, people still call. I finally resorted to unplugging the phone at night after a certain hour with a message on my voice mail to try their call again in the morning or to page me (I carry one for work because I have to) in the event of an emergency. This has helped quite a bit. Once before, I changed my phone number, blocked caller-id, and didn't give the number to my kids for about three weeks. They could call out, but didn't know a number to give people to call them. I finally gave them the number but it was a quiet three weeks.

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