Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls

I am not a huge fan of cellular telephones. I suppose to be completely honest, I am not a fan of telephones of any sort. Part of this may stem from the number of times the phone rings at my house and the voice on the other end is asking for me is less than thirty-three and a third percent of the time. This makes some sense, since I am not here very often, spending a great deal of my time on my way to work, at work, or on my way home from work. I expect that the bulk of calls coming into our land line are directed to my wife, who is at work at our home. Even when I come home from work and find that my wife has voice mail messages stacked up from the time that she has been away from work. At home. That's about the time the phone rings and when I answer, I hear my wife's voice informing me that she is not home, at which point I feel compelled to remind her of just how many calls she has received since she left.
My son gets a certain amount of calls, but anyone who really wants to connect with him will get there most readily by hooking up with him on his ineradicable Android texting machine. So much so that it seems as though most of his interactions take place via some keyboard or screen. Sometimes we don't see his friends for weeks, but we know they are out there because of the beeps and buzzes and not-so-casual glances made to see what or whom is up.
Me? I've got my own cellular telephone. It's the thing that's connecting me to those things related to school. When I hear that beep, I now something has changed. Or something is about to happen. Or something isn't going to happen after all. I am only recently becoming more comfortable with the notion that the sound that you hear could involve me. I am becoming conditioned. Almost Pavlovian. I know this because there is a malfunctioning PA speaker in the hallway across from one of our first grade classrooms. It beeps. Not loudly, just loud enough to give me the impression that somewhere in my pocket is a cellular telephone making that sound and it needs my abrupt attention. Only once in the last five weeks has that noise coincided with an actual call or text for yours truly. The other five or six hundred times it was the mistaken impression that someone was trying to get in touch with me.
I should know better. If the phone rings, it's probably for my wife. Any phone. Always.