The Common Denominator

We have had an ongoing phone issue in our household.

You see, John works on the second floor and I work in the basement. If the phone rings, we have a system - I look at the Caller ID to see if it's for me. I then either pick up within 2 rings or let it keep ringing which signals John to pick up and take a message. Cause sometimes I simply can't talk or don't want to like if I'm in an art zone, have paint all over myself or something like that.

The problem arises after I finish a call because John can't tell when I am off the phone. His job requires him to be on the phone a lot. Which means one of us is always running up and down the steps to see if the other person is on or off the phone. I have tried to yell up from the basement but that is not terribly successful and Lord only knows I have given it a good effort but it's just too far plus my sweetie is half deaf. Only within the range of my voice of course.

We sometimes call each other in the house using our cell phones and we also briefly considered walkie talkies which seemed equally ridiculous. So we basically rationalized the purchase of new phones. The thing is we needed new ones anyway because it seems the life expectancy of a cordless phone has plummeted in recent years. Like many other products, the quality is so poor that our existing phones don't work that well and get horrible reception. Honestly, I don't know what we expected when we bought little $10 phones anyway.

John went out and bought this really slick looking phone system that we will be able to add on to with additional handsets. It has like a million Ghz whatever that is, way more than any of our other phones and is apparently smart enough to search for the best reception so you get the clearest call every time. There are cool ring tones to pick from. The phones also have a color display which is totally unnecessary (but pretty)and you can pick a "wallpaper" for your phone. I chose a beach picture. I don't know what John chose for his. The phones have all sorts of additional functionality that I doubt we will be able to operate.

But the intercom rocks. Around 5:50pm I paged John from the Studio phone up to Base (which is his phone).

"Hi," he says.

"Hey, it's me. I'm starving. You want to eat early?"

"Yeah, sure, let me finish up something and I'll meet you in the kitchen.

About 2 minutes later I saw something cute on the NBC nightly news, out-take footage of Pandas. It was so funny, these adorable Pandas wrestling with the NBC reporter and cameraman. I paged John again.

"Hi," he says.

"It's me again. You might was to go downstairs to replay the end of the nightly news, it is really cute."

"Ok," he says. "And honey.........I already know it's you. Who else would it be?"