Paging Doctor Pavlov

I forget the date, but over a year or so ago I was in the middle of Ohio for one of those end-of-the-year gorge yourself winter holidays and the girlfriend of my ex-girlfriend's brother had the same cell phone as I did. Her default text message notification tone was the same as the default text message notification tone on my phone.

It was the sound I would hear at four in the morning when someone, anyone really, decided to call the magic phone number that they believed would fix their data loss/hardware failure problems for them. Over and over again I would hear this sound, every fifteen minutes, until either I fixed the problem or, just as often, the person I was shadowing woke up, called the client back, and fixed it.

I cannot tell you how many times that person, whomever he may have been, fell through and left me holding the bag for forty-five tense and sleepless minutes (Or more!) in the middle of night.

I grew to hate and fear that sound. Within the span of a single evening, the girl had received maybe a dozen text messages from her various bffs. Each one would make that terrible sound. I swear I was in a fetal position on the sofa for at least one part of her stay in the house.

Of course, after the first few months of living with this tone, I had to change it, so I picked a more innocuous sound that didn't make me nauseous and shell-shocked whenever Verizon would decide to send me some unsolicited advertisement. I'd changed my ringtone long before winding up in a neurotic ball on the couch that night in Ohio, but the fear and dread of the ringtone was and is forever ingrained into my little grey cells.

I mention this because I've been using that second, slightly less infuriating ringtone for about a year and a half now. I paid my cell phone bill tonight and, as usual, Verizon notified me with a text message that my payment had been received.

"Ding!"

And in that moment, even that new ringtone made me anxious. At a year and a half old and in no way, shape, or form affiliated with late-night rush charges and impending fear of your primary engineer not waking up and doing his job, my phone still has the power to stress me out. I suppose it was only a matter of time until any sound associated with such unpleasant memories makes me want to go catatonic.