There was a time when a person wandering around talking to themselves conjured up an image of the town drunk or some sort of paranoid schizophrenic. You know the sort of dazed weirdo, stumbling past you in the middle of the afternoon, grumbling loudly, "And another thing!!!"
Not so today, thanks to that handy little invention known as the cell phone headset. Now you can go about your business, in the middle of a public place, talking to your husband about what to have for dinner or how you'd like to spend your weekend, all the while appearing as a total lunatic nutball to anyone who doesn't see that you've got one of these little thing-a-ma-bobs neatly hidden beneath your carefully coiffed 'do.
I can imagine a time, not too far in the future, in which an entire grocery store full of people mull about, engaged in conversations with anyone but those around them in the flesh. The hushed rumble of intimate discourse...that I'm not a part of!
What if every single person on the other end of each line coincidentally told jokes at the exact same moment? The entire grocery store erupts into laughter, only nobody's amused by the same thing. (Unless, by an even greater coincidence, it was the same joke being told through every single headset. But I mean, come on - I'm trying to operate on a plane of reality here.)
What if everyone broke into song simultaneously? It would make the absurd logistics of the Broadway musical a thing of the past. I see this happening in the meat department.
What if aliens were able to intercept and warp our technology and fry all the brains in one fell swoop? Why would they do this, you ask? Well, that's easy: aliens want all of our Ding-Dongs and they haven't mastered the art of shoplifting. I say give 'em our Ding-Dongs now, and let's save our brains for better uses later on.
Like building smaller headsets, because that's what we need. These headsets need to be so tiny, that they can simply be surgically inserted as a couple chips in the ear canal and inner lip, preferably at birth. When technology has reached this point of orgasmic perfection, we can sleep soundly at night, and "I'm not crazy, I'm on the phone!" will be a simple, expected part of everyday speech.
Now I'm not crazy, and I'm not on the phone, but I am off to write an outline for a Broadway musical about Ding-Dong thieving aliens who tell bad jokes in order to lull Earthlings into a false sense of security because shoplifiting is something they just never thought of.
Stupid aliens. Damn them and the damn Ding-Dongs. I always preferred Twinkies anyway.
