“You’ve won a million dollars in our sweepstakes, how do you feel?”
This is not how the day usually starts. It usually starts with an utterance of impending vengeance upon the nearby alarm clock. Then the vengeance begins. The other day, however, the usual morning routine was shattered by the ringing of my telephone. This is not a common occurrence. The telephone I mean (mornings happen quite a lot around here, much to my chagrin). I answer the telephone :
“You’ve won a million dollars in our sweepstakes, how do you feel?”
What do you say to something like this. There isn’t a rehearsed contingency for this up my sleeve.
“I’m just tingly all over.” And then I hung up.
Perhaps it was the young, female, monotone voice on the phone that didn’t exactly lend credence to the statement. Its not that I would turn down instant millions, its just that the message had better be sent in a professional, mature manner in order for me to believe it.
And then, later, the dreaded wheels in my mind started turning.
What if this wasn’t a young teenage girl with a telephone prank up her sleeve? What if the laughing in the background was in fact a television or something, or perhaps a coworker had just regaled a rapt audience with wild tales of the weekend? What if I had really won a million dollars, and my terse, sarcastic reply had rendered me amounst the poor (monetarily) for the rest of my life? What if the shattering of my morning routine had really been a good thing, and not the apocalypse from the telephone that I had envisioned?
I guess I’ll never know. Maybe she’ll call back.