"Whoever it is, I'm not at home!" How liberating it is to declare one's absence in the face of the telephone's insistent ringing. Like a burglar, a ringing phone these days is often a malign intruder; it invades our privacy and threatens our serenity. In my dotage, I have joined the growing ranks of those suffering from phone fatigue. Amid our wired and wireless world, the home phone has become a menace rather than a friend. More often than not, an evening call means someone is dialing for dollars, trying to sell something or conduct a marketing survey. The unwanted calls, usually triggered by computer programs, conspire to disrupt the dinner hour, when people are most available yet least inclined to hear an uninvited sales pitch. Thank goodness for voice mail and caller identification.

Am I simply getting old and crotchety? After all, I used to love the telephone. As a youth during the 1960s, I viewed the phone as my magical lifeline to the world. Western Electric's new "touch-tone" push buttons connected me with friends and liberated me from family. A phone call brought mystery and excitement: who was on the line? Then there was so much to discuss: ourselves, each other, homework, girls, school activities, girls, cars, girls. Back then, long before the advent of telemarketing, phone calls were a welcome event. The shouted answer to a ringing phone in our household was "I'll get it-it's for me, I'm sure."

The problem was that my siblings and I did not have phones of our own (much less, the modern wireless versions). The two family phones were unassigned luxury items that belonged to everyone and no one. At the startling sound of the first ring, my brother, sister, and I would begin racing from our respective locations to the nearest phone, each of us supremely confident that the call was ours. If I won the race, I would then have to catch my breath so as to appear nonchalant to the caller. If, on the other hand, my ruffian older siblings got there first, God forbid, and the call was indeed for me, then the competitive ritual continued, forcing me to shout from the other line, "I've got it-you can hang up now." They rarely did; it was too much fun to try to listen in. I'm surprised I did not develop some sort of neurosis. For all of the hassle, however, the phone served as a beloved refuge and outlet. I still remember the family phone number some thirty-five years later.

During the 1960s, a telephone was the best hope for adolescents urgently seeking outlets for self-expression and independence (cars came later in life-if at all). To be sure, our phone dialogues were rarely weighty and often silly. Yet they assumed a vital importance in the rite of passage from elementary to high school. So it was a sad day indeed when my sister began going steady with an older guy. That meant the phone would be tied up every night. Age had its privileges in our household, and I was the youngest. Desperate for a dial tone, I found a discarded rotary dial phone in our basement and began futile efforts to connect it to the trunk line, naively thinking I could fashion a parallel connection. My collection of Popular Mechanics magazines offered no guidance for such an ambitious effort, and I eventually gave up.

The years passed and brother and sister, bless their hearts, went off to college. Amid tearful goodbyes, I could not help thinking: free at last. The phone was now mine. No more jockeying for calling time. No more snooping siblings. In fact, I now had my own phone, graciously passed on to me by my sister. I was so happy with my new possession that I did not mind it being a pink "Princess" model. Soon my bedroom was a hive of humming conversations. Life was good.
Now all that has changed. We spend our workdays in a frenzy of constant communication: e-mail, FAX, pagers, beepers, cell phones. The average person sends and receives a total of 180 messages each day. The communications barrage interrupts us three or more times an hour on average, leaving us besieged and overwhelmed. By the time we arrive home in the evening, the last thing we want to confront is an anonymous phone solicitor. So let it ring. Call me a curmudgeon. Call me callous. Just don't call me. Unless, of course, you are calling on behalf of the Furman Fund.