Telephony Talion

Four years and two friaries ago, I was given the ministry of telephone menu administration in our little community. One of the friars had changed rooms, so I had to change the menus. As I was recording the new menu, one of the brothers (the room changer, not incidentally) entered the room just as I was pronouncing his name. "He rules!!!," came the response to his own name. His outburst could be heard in the background on the recorded menu, and I left it there.

Well, the telephone administrator for my new home, a friar who doesn't live here but in another friary nearby, came by this morning to update the directory and and add me to the phone menu. As anyone knows who has ever had to record a phone menu, especially one that has a lot of different names, titles, and numbers, your rarely succeed on the first try. You sit there recording and re-recording until you remember everyone and get it just right. After all, it's your voice that greets the world outside. Thinking it rude to abandon my brother at his task (I was the only one home), but not wanting to stand over his shoulder when he was trying to concentrate, I went around the corner to the kitchen and started to cook up a quesadilla. It was almost lunch time anyway, and besides, maybe I would have a chance to offer something to my confrere.

As fate and the gods of telecommunications would have it, I fumbled a cutting board with a crash just as my own name was being recorded. "I'm leaving that in there," says the friar, "I had the whole thing right at last, and it's your own fault."