Weaver rough on phone cords, or vice versa

I don't know what I do to my telephone cords, but apparently I have some pent-up hostility toward them.

The cord between the receiver and the console on my desk at work is a tangled mess of complexities possessing more twists and turns than a Stephen King novel.

A previous cord, which was much longer, got so entangled a kindly co-worker took pity upon either it or me and replaced it with a much shorter one.

To little avail.

Oh, what a tangled cord Weaver weaves!

I don't think I'm doing anything particularly abusive to the cord. I'm not asking it to do anything beyond the job duties required of a phone cord - connecting one part of the phone to another so that there's noise when I press the correct end of the receiver to my ear.

I don't even think I'm twirling it the wrong way, or a different way each time. Although, come to think of it, if I answered the phone by spinning it in a new direction each time I make a call, and back in the opposite direction every time a call is incoming, I would think that would work out the kinks …

I think we have now gone far beyond the level of thought any person who is not a telephone operations expert has ever had to put into answering or speaking into a mouthpiece.

It'd be one thing if this were only a workplace occurrence, but the same thing is happening to my telephone at home.

Any calls into my apartment are typically greeted with a loud, deafening bang as the machine hits the wall and then drops to the floor, the result of a cord spun once too many times, so tightly wound it's the equivalent of a loaded bear trap. Grizzlies could not answer my telephone without some degree of nervousness.

Of course, the only calls which come into that phone are telemarketers, recorded advertisements - the worst offender of which is the one which opens with a the blast of a ship's foghorn; I die a little inside every time I race from the shower to answer it and get that noise blaring in my ear drum - people seeking the previous occupants of my apartment or those annoying calls where whoever it is doesn't say anything, just waits like half a moment and then hangs up.

I've gone from being freaked out to waiting them out, remaining on the line to see who gets bored first or making a large sound like a yawn to see if I can get the mysterious, annoying caller to feel sleepy enough to take a nap or, you know, get a life.

So I'm all right with killing their eardrums with a loud racket.

But I can't wait for the day phone cords are completely and utterly replaced by cordless phones and cellphones. We'll see them in museum exhibits alongside horse buggy whips and record players.

Exhibit visitors will sigh upon looking into the glass display cases at the cords and say, "Oh, how quaint," never once suspecting the difficulties this invention once put humanity through.