The phone at work has an awful, awful ring. It's loud, metallic, and it bounces around my head for hours after I've left the store. It's the sort of sound that nightmares are made of, the sound that I might wake up to, screaming because I thought I was being disemboweled, but in fact, I would merely be remembering the quarter-second tone that blasts through my few square feet of workspace whenever a lost soul comes to me (or my colleagues) for guidance. Indeed, if hell's phones are ringing, I bet they sound like this.

Perhaps the most jarring feature of the all the phones at work, however, are simply their instantaneous ability to command attention, a power that existed even before these hell-born tones were introduced into my day. Whatever I'm doing is secondary to picking it up, and if what I'm doing precludes me from using a phone, part of my job description is to 1) feel guilty about my inability to reach the phone, and 2) silently will one of my co-workers to answering it, if only to stave off that demonic ringtone.

Ultimately, I've never been a fan of phones. They're a strong contender in my rather short list of pet peeves, valiantly wrestling for the top position against my mother's desire to hide the pots I use as ashtrays. It's probably something I inherited from my family. Since the dawn of caller-ID, we stopped answering our phones except to those wise enough to call at least twice, yet my father insists on keeping a phone in every room of the house, that we might more efficiently ignore them.

It's nice to be working again, though.