How I Came to be Struck By Lightening (and how it was all my wife's fault)

Back in the day when only wealthy people could afford cell phones, the poor man's version of the electronic leash was the beeper. There was a whole industry devoted to these tiny gadgets that you wore clipped to your belt.

Although they were designed to convey no more information other than the numer of whomever wanted to get ahold of you, ingenious people devised various methods to convey differing levels of importance to the call. The most powerful of these was the 911 suffix. Anytime your beeper went off and you saw your home number with the numbers, "911" attached at the end, the meaning was obvious. Dire circumstances were afoot at home...little Timmy had fallen down the well....one of the children was separated from an appendage or two...armed marauders were at the door...in short, your entire life had just been turned upside down and the person who had just beeped you was the harbinger of the horrible news.

And so it happened that one day, while I was at work, I recieved the dreaded beeper call with the 911 suffix. I instantly excused myself from the meeting I was attending and rushed to my desk to dial the phone. As I feared, my sobbing, hysterical wife answered. "It's me...what's going on?"

"(SOB)...(SOB)..Daniel...he...he...stepped in (SOB) in front of a school bus...(SOB)"

"Is he alive?"

It was at this point that my wife's crying instantly ceased and she calmly launched into a narrative,

"Well, I was taking the laundry to the laundry mat..."

"NO", I screamed, "Don't tell me a story...IS HE ALIVE?!?!?!?"

I need to insert an editorial comment or two here..Dear wives, if your husband is ever is in the uneviable position of asking you if one of his children is alive, all that is required of you is a simple yes or no answer. Anything more than that is unnecessary, cruel, and grounds for several lectures to which you really ought to humbly submit but probably won't.

Along similar lines, you ought to know that your husbands really do view your home as a castle. The only reason we ever mow the yard is to provide a kill zone and if you'd let us, we would put in a moat. When we are called away on business, our imaginations conjure up all kinds of horrible things that could happen to our family while we are helpless to stop it.

Therefore, texting your husband on his cell phone, "call me" can set his heart racing for a second before he realizes that you just want to talk and you selfishly want him to expend HIS minutes instead of you expending yours. Texting, "Call me NOW" should be used only in instances akin to the aforementioned 911 scenarios.

Believe me when I tell you that your husband is woefully inadequate when it comes to matters of clairvoyance and has no way of knowing that "Call me NOW" really means, "I only have five minutes left on my lunch break and I'd like to chat with you for a moment". Now...back to our story....

That night, my wife and I had a frank discussion on the proper use of the 911 suffix. She apologized, said she understood and for nine months or so, everything was peachy. Then one day, I was driving through what was possibly one of the worst thunderstorms I had ever seen.

My beeper went off and, since I was driving in life threatening circumstances, I ignored it. It went off again and I still ignored it. It went off the third time and this time I pulled the beeper from my belt, took my eyes off the road so that I could hazard a glance. There it was...my home number with those horrible three numbers afterwards. 911.

I immediately pulled off the freeway onto a feeder road, found a service station and rushed in and, holding up my beeper with the 911 numbers plainly visible, I asked the attendant if I could use his phone. He never even stopped chewing on his sandwich but just calmly pointed to the payphone standing in the deluge right next to the feeder road.

Angrily mumbling something or other about the service station attendent's questionable ancestry, I ran out into the storm, pulled a quarter from my pocket, inserted it into the pay phone, dialed my house and waited for two or three rings before my wife answered."What? What? What?", I asked.

"Hi Honey", my wife sweetly answered, "I just wanted you to be aware that there's a real bad storm out there and I wanted you to be carefu...."

"CEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAACKI!!!!!!!!!"My entire world went blue-white. For about fifteen minutes I couldn't see and I couldn't hear for another thirty afterwards. The service station attendant who had thankfully finished his sandwich picked me up as I blindly crawled along the feeder road.

That night, I took a ball-peen hammer, called my wife into the kitchen and we bid farewell forever to the beeper. (for two weeks my mouth tasted like burnt matches)