Stories of the Street - Thirty six

Mike opens the door and signs the deliveryman’s pad, takes the parcel from him and whoops as he closes the door.

“This is unreal!” he yells as he charges through to the sitting room, pushes his dog off the settee and sits down placing the box on the little table beside his coffee cup. Leaning to one side he pulls open a drawer in the dresser next to the settee and pulls out large scissors. He is soon into the box through the plastic bag and past the seal and is handling his wonderful new, all singing, all dancing ‘phone. It’s just a matter of putting the parts together and plugging it into the charger. He looks in glee to see the battery is half charged but he knows well enough that he needs to charge it fully before going out with it.

Sitting on the settee with the dog still trying to stick her wet nose into the interesting bits on the table and in his hands, Mike begins to play with it, trying the little stick like thing to write things, following the instructions to allow it to understand his handwriting, checking out how to go on line, downloading a podcast, checking his emails, texts and so on.

From time to time he has to shout something aloud like, “Wow!” or “Yeah!” or even “Shit!” and so on. Sometimes that is just not enough and he has to stand up to do the shouting. Mike is grinning so broadly and persistently that after a while his face begins to hurt a little.

Checking for the fifth time the contractual agreement he decides that, with the facilities of the ‘phone, he can do a little test – in fact do something that has probably never been done before. He composes a jokey text, “Hi Matt, this new ‘phone of mine is SHIT HOT! Are you jealous yet?” Obviously, he does not use as many letters (or, in some cases, even the same letters) as this version in his text.

He then gets the ‘phone to send it to Matt a thousand times.

“Unlimited texts, means UNLIMITED!” he yells at the phone and pure joy ripples through him.

Amazingly, in just another hour the ‘phone is fully charged and he picks it up and skips happily out of the flat into the mid morning sunshine.

He sees Matt running towards him and waves happily. He doges Matt’s first attempt at a punch but is unable to stop himself being pushed against the wall.

“You sent me the same text A THOUSAND times!” Yells Matt. “Why did you do that to me. That was rotten. I’m still getting them and I can’t delete them fast enough! You’ve fucked my ‘phone.”

“Sorry mate – I was just going for a record. Unlimited texts, I nearly texted you a million times to see if they would let me do it but then, I thought, they might chicken out and start charging me for them.”

Matt is lost for words for a couple of minutes, staring with hard cold eyes into Mike’s face. Then he pushes Mike harder and says, “Unlimited texts?”

“Yeh,” says Mike, “Who will we text next?”

Matt pauses for a moment and says, “Have you still got the number of that creep that ran into the back of your car?”

They both start whooping as they walk down the road, Matt deleting endless texts and Mike composing a suitably nasty text.

Let’s see,” Mike says as he pauses for a moment, “How do I make my number ‘withheld’ on this ‘phone