Timing is Everything

The other day I was in the men’s room in the building where I work. I’m not going to say where I was specifically or what I may or may not have been doing and will simply leave it at that. I will say, however, there was a man in one of the stalls whose cell phone rang. This caught my attention and I watched through the gap between the floor and partition as he scrambled to find his phone. He had the ringer set quite high and was having trouble retrieving it, you know with his pants around his ankles and all.

None of us can control when a call comes in and while my personal tendency is to keep my phone on vibrate mode each of us has our own personal cell phone preferences. If it were me, however, in this man’s situation I would have found my phone, cancelled the call and when the time was more suited returned the call. This is what I expected Mr. Office Stall to do and was surprised when I heard him say “hello.” He followed this with what I would consider a lengthy conversation under any circumstances. This was one of those two-way conversations that to me as an outsider sounded casual and something that could have easily been postponed. A chat, really and again, as an outsider, there was nothing comfortable about it.

When the call finally did come to an end I was surprised to hear Mr. O. S. say, “Hey could I call you back? I’m kinda in the middle of something.”

I wondered what had prevented him from starting things off that way.