Kickass and Telephone Talk

Kickass, the doorstop dog, sympathizes with the keeper in his extreme telephone ineptness in this phone-saturated world that requires him to have a fulltime personal telephone operator—Phyllis, of course.

It is the keeper’s sense that his phone difficulty began with his very first phone call when his mother needed to get a message to him at the old Ward School where he was a 2^ndgrader and needed to stand on a chair to use the school’s only wall phone. Obviously never having participated in an actual phone call but having overheard many made by adults, the keeper’s first words to his mother whom he had been with only hours ago was “How are you?”

The keeper seems to remember that it broke Mom up, and therefore set in stone a less than compatible telephone relationship for him.

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” being the first telephone conversation in history—Mar. 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell in Boston, is in second place in significance in the keeper’s telephone experience. In first place, of course, is the one he got laughed at for asking his mother “How are you?”

Phyllis, who lives with her phone, may laugh but is also likely to sigh.