Technophile

Aggie loved her landline phone. Her dedication to this old-fashioned technology was unheard of in their social circle, but she had pressed Bean on the matter so extensively that he no longer mentioned the potential cost savings of scrapping it and living an untethered life.

Bean himself had a newfangled mobile telephone that could, in addition to making shoddy calls that almost always cut out early, order food and speak movie times out loud and print documents. He had used his wife’s credit card to purchase a brand new printer that could talk to his phone and a brand new stereo that, though it had several CD decks, streamed music directly off his phone in embarrassingly poor quality, though Bean constantly commented on the tinny speaker’s superiority over similar brands. He often would snap his fingers when lecturing Aggie about how connected the world was becoming. Lidia had taken to copying him, and Aggie was now constantly coming up against a wall of attitude from the both of them.

Earlier in the month, in a moment of crisis while riding the elevator with one of the young punks upstairs, Jefferson had considered getting a phone like the one he had seen Bean playing with in front of the building. It seemed to give him the power to ignore the wails of his child and the nagging of his wife by engrossing him thoroughly in video games with very basic premises. According to Bean, these newfangled mobile telephones were changing lives. Gone were the days of sitting at a computer and typing with all ten fingers, mousing over to print icons, searching for documents by hand. It was a connected world. This concept was illustrated with a snap.

Jefferson got it, though he opted to accept a hand-me-down phone model from his sister to start with. It had purple rhinestones surrounding the screen and was sold to him as a stepping-stone phone. A phone to teach him about the ways of the phoned before he got in over his head.

Jefferson got the hang of the whole phone internet thing rather quickly, or thought he did, but he had started unintentionally bombarding printers on local networks from his phone with quotes by Arthur Schlick’s, a childhood friend who was turning himself into a self-help guru according to the interwebs. This had, in turn, started a war with the owner of Fung Wa, who began leaving quotes by philosophers in local printer boxes all over the neighborhood. Then, Mr. Hertz had upped the ante and began leaving pornographic pictures in printers boxes far and wide.

Bean started to notice the quote printouts just a week or so after running into Jefferson outside the building. Quotes by famous authors, philosophers, celebrities, and some by a man named Arthur Schlick, whose claim to fame was usually listed as, “money manager and friend of the stars.” The phenomenon was costing Bean sheets and sheets of his prized high-quality extra-bright paper every day. It was not acceptable.

Aggie suggested that Bean might be printing the quotes unintentionally from his phone, and both immediately had focused a laser-like stare on at the harmless plastic contraption, wondering why it was possessed with a need to share wisdom with people as learned as them. Bean began toying with the phone even more constantly, looking at it all through dinner, while doing errands, and while in bed. The unexplained quotes began to create a gulf between him and Aggie, constantly cloying at them. Finally, Aggie had to address it.

“Are you looking up quotes on your phone? I don’t mean to point fingers, but if you are I think you should just tell me and get it over with.”

“No, Aggie.” He stressed her name to indicate that he was feeling exasperated with her. “I do not have a thing for quotes. I am not a quote man.” Lidia snapped her fingers.

“I wont judge you for it. I just think you should tell me if you are doing this.”

“Aggie! His face began to turn red. “I do not spend the day looking up quotes on my phone. Can we drop it?”

“Well then how are they getting there, Bean? How? Tell me?”

They ignored it again for a few days but the problem persisted and finally, without an explanation, Bean did the only thing that he could think of to save his marriage. He began leaving the quotes on other people’s doorsteps before Aggie could see them. He became a building wisdom fairy of sorts, oft discussed in the hallways by other residents who were eager to know where the papers bearing advice on wooing women and living richly were coming from.

It was when the porn began to come in that Bean got rid of the phone. When that didn’t work, he got rid of the printer. Soon, him and Aggie began talking again during dinner, took walks together, shared in household chores. Lidia stopped snapping at people. At their next dinner party, Bean made an impassioned defense of their landline and Aggie nearly offered to marry him for a second time.

When Bean next saw Jefferson outside of the building, he was hit with a wave of nostalgia, recognizing the hungry look of somebody who was thinking about their phone. He did not miss the feeling, and hoping to share some real-life wisdom, he did something unusual. He took Jefferson’s phone away. Just grabbed it and walked inside.