paging Mr. Mabe, Mr. Mabe*

Once upon a time, two white bred poodles** moved to what was still pretty much the ghetto and wisely installed a security alarm. Unfortunately, said alarm required a land line also be installed so it could call the five-o when somebody tried to break in and kill them. This begs the assumption that the alarm would have better luck contacting the authorities than real live humans, because the last time somebody was kicking in my door I was put on hold by 911. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, knowing we’re so well protected.

Anyway, the land line and security alarm were installed. When the cat set off the alarm by knocking its water dish into the wall with the glass-breaking-sound-sensor-thing, they learned that the alarm was loud. The loud alarm and its direct connection to the po po made them feel safe. Then one day people started asking them if their phone was disconnected since they couldn’t reach the poodles via the land line. “No,” they replied, “we just don’t answer it. 99% of the calls are from telemarketers. Call our cells like normal human beings if you want to talk to us. Sheesh.”

Little did they know, the land line was broken. Who was protecting them, then? There was no dial tone when the home phone was picked up. Just whoosh! It had disappeared. It was a mystery. MCI tried and tried to make it reappear, to no avail. The poodles refused to pay for the service, since they duh, weren’t getting any, so the land line went extinct in the ghetto house. They rebuilt their sense of false security by remembering that the alarm was loud, so they’d just set if off and scare bad guys away if they tried to kick in the door again.

This arrangement was all fine and good until they remembered that they were going to be leaving the country and really didn’t like the fact that if something happened while their house & dog sitter was at work, noone would know, and they couldn’t be contacted. So the attempts to fix the land line resumed.

As God has a wonderful sense of humor, the phone line that had been giving the poodles fits for almost a year was able to be fixed in 2 seconds once they found the right person to diagnose the problem. 2 minutes after a dial tone was heard for the first time in 11 months, the poodles were thanking the service guy when the phone rang. They looked at each other in confusion, and the she-poodle said that she hadn’t given the number to anyone yet. With no small amount of trepidation, she clicked the Talk button and said, “Hello?”

“Hello, is this Mrs. Poodle? I’m calling on behalf of the Fraternal Order of Police, and they need your money!”

Are you fucking kidding me? The ringer has now been superglued in the Off position.

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* Tom Mabe pranks telemarketers. It’s brilliant.

** There was a song called White Bred Poodle in a movie I worked on, but I can’t find the lyrics or a sample of it anywhere, but essentially it was talking about this little white girl who was totally out of her element around a bunch of underground, singing, cussing lefties. Not saying anything about politics, just that we were out of our element.