You`ve been in the shower or tub just long enough to get completely wet and soapy and-oh, no, it can`t be.
The telephone rings, and it`s a caller who won`t give up. On and on it rings and finally, despite vowing that you won`t, you do. Out you go, tripping on the bath towel you`ve grabbed, dripping and swearing.
Then, just as you pick up the phone, the caller hangs up, or even worse, it`s that person: the one who always calls at the wrong time.
Almost everyone knows such a person and very often it`s someone who is not a close friend.
Sometimes, it`s someone you don`t even like.
But like or dislike is immaterial. This man or woman is a genius at pinpointing the worst possible time to call.
If you`re not in the shower, you`re in the middle of a wonderful book or television program, or the souffle has just been put on the table, or after an hour of tossing you`ve finally fallen asleep.
Mixed emotions
Don Dellair has such a caller, and he is torn between frustration at his inability to do anything about the problem, irritation and a blend of feeling sorry for the woman and being sort of fond of her.
”You can bank on it: whenever you don`t want the phone to ring, it does, and it`s her,” said Dellair, who owns an artists` management company with his partner, Tommy Wonder.
”She`s retired from show business, and her calls are usually long dissertations on her recent activities.”
The conversation, he said, proceeds along these lines:
He: ”Can I call you back?”
She: ”Oh, did I disturb you?”
He: ”Well, I was just sitting down.”
”She goes on for half an hour,” Dellair said, ”and finally says: `I don`t want to disturb you.`
” `Call me back.`
”She`s always upset that she`s disturbed me, but she always continues.
”And it`s usually when the mystery on television is being solved or I`ve just picked up my fork.”
Too late, baby
Barbara Frank admits that her hours are a bit unusual.
She gets up at 5:30 a.m. and tries to get to sleep by 10 p.m. Her friends know this, but it doesn`t stop one of them from telephoning after curfew.
”I keep reminding her, but it doesn`t help,” said Frank, who is on the international marketing desk at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith.
”She just phones when it`s convenient for her.”
Frank has another sort of wrong-time caller: apartment owners in her co-op building, where she is on the board.
Almost always, she said, complaints and queries come ”when, for the first time in three months, I`ve made mashed potatoes and I`m about to start eating them.”
Plain inconsiderate
Sarina Tang, who owns Art Options, a business that helps corporations acquire art collections, always gets calls at the wrong time. She could blame it on the time difference between here and Japan: Her sister, who lives in Tokyo at the moment, is the usual culprit.
But it`s more than that. ”She just phones when she feels like it,” Tang said.
When Dr. Baila Zeitz, a psychologist, gets a call just after she`s ended a day of seeing eight or nine patients and is physically tired, tired of talking to people and hungry, she knows who it is.
It`s a colleague who, despite being asked not to, persists in calling at the wrong time.
”I`ve told him it`s not a good time, but he takes it as gentle kidding,” she said.
”Otherwise, he`s wonderful.”
Zeitz said she has tried to break her friend of the habit.
”I`ve tried not calling him on some occasions, or calling him at a time I`m reasonably sure he`d be unhappy,” she said.
”Nothing works.”
Worth the hassle
”But I`ve weighed the pluses and minuses,” she added, ”and decided it`s worthwhile putting up with it because I like him very much.”
Gloria DeHaven describes her ”wrong-time calling person” as a generous woman who offers to water her plants when she is out of town, and invites her to dinners and concerts.
This woman is a ”dear” person, DeHaven says, but one with whom she can`t spend more than an hour at a time.
DeHaven-who was in scores of motion pictures (”Two Girls and a Sailor”
and ”Best Foot Forward” among them) and spent four years recently on the soap opera ”Ryan`s Hope”-always knows it is this woman when she doesn`t want the telephone to ring and it does.
”I feel guilty because she`s so well-meaning,” she said.
”But I make up a kind fib and hang up.”
The silent treatment
One person who doesn`t allow himself such problems is G. Leslie Fabian, a partner in Ward Howell International, an executive search company.
Fabian believes in the right to privacy, a subject on which he wrote a thesis when he was in law school.
”People have been brainwashed that they have to respond to the phone,”
he said.
”I won`t allow it.
”I just let it ring, or I take it off the hook.
”It drives people crazy.” –
