The Politics of Phony Solutions

I hear that the politically correct response to the ongoing. NYNEX strike--the way that we students can best express our solidarity with the oppressed employees of the telephone company--is to refuse to pay our phone bills this month. To me, that seems a tempting way to "fight the power," but in the end it's a move that my roommates and I simply cannot afford to make.

After all, our phone service is much too important to us to risk losing it, for however short a time. There are five of us, and six of them (telephones, that is). We're outnumbered.

Now that we finally live in a suite with as many bedrooms as people, we figured that having one telephone per person would be the only fair arrangement. There are only two catches: our various phones are extensions of only one line, so unlike our bedrooms, they can only be used one at a time. And somehow, we ended up deciding to put another extension in the common room (to go with the answering machine). So if you believe there's power in numbers, then the phones have the power in our room.

CRIMSON Key tour guides tell prospective students that the charm of a Harvard suite derives from its brick walls, old fireplaces, carved wooden mantle and chandeliers.

The charm of our suite is of a different nature: it comes from the preponderance of wires and masking tape covering every otherwise-spare surface. We thought that poster gum might look better than masking tape, but it just didn't hold the wire.

In order to get working telephones in every bedroom, we had to run wires under all the doors. That sounds easy; we'd heard the phrase "spaghetti thin" and assumed that telephone wire was at least as thin as spaghetti.

It turns out, however, that the space between the bottom of our doors and the floor is as thin as linguine. Opening and closing our doors thus becomes a major ordeal, worse than maneuvering an overstuffed sock drawer at eight-thirty in the morning.

WE'RE pretty much used to being wired by now. The real travail is in the actual use of our phones. When the phone rings, nobody knows what to do.

First it rings once, and everyone hopes somebody else will get it. Nobody does.

Then it rings again, and everyone hopes somebody else will get it. Nobody does.

On the third ring, I begin to think that maybe nobody else is home after all. I make a mad dive for the phone, not wanting to have to run upstairs to turn the answering machine off when the fourth ring comes.

Everyone else always has the same idea. "Hello?" I say. "Hello?" my roommate Adam says. "Hello?" my other three roommates say simultaneously.

The person who's calling usually doesn't realize that five people have answered the phone. He or she thinks there's just some funny echo in the phone line. So they say, for instance, "Can I speak to Jim?" and Jim says "This is he" and the rest of us slink away.

Things aren't always so easy, of course. My roommates and I are not always on exactly the same wavelength. It so happens that the pause between rings is exceedingly long in our room. Thus, I often pick up the receiver toward the start of the third pause and am already engrossed in conversation when one of my roommates gets around to answering the phone at what they mistakenly think is the tail end of the long-gone pause. In such cases, a "Hello?" suddenly punctuates my discourse, and I usually decide it's easier to say I'm schizophrenic than to explain what's really going on.

MUCH to my regret, I generally make more telephone calls than I receive. And the difficulties of owning several phones are just as overwhelming when it comes to placing calls as when it comes to responding to them.

When I pick up the receiver in order to make a call and I hear a conversation already going on, I am unable to suppress an instinctive urge to blurt out "Oops, sorry." I fully realize that my roommates are likely to mistake that utterance for the call-waiting tone and that I therefore frequently cause them to accidentally hang up on their friends. I can't help it, though.

I should not imply that I possess a monopoly on phone-awkardness in my suite. My roommates have also created a problem or two for me, getting on the line in the middle of a call. My conversations are thus regularly punctuated by clicks and clacks of all sorts.

MY politically left-leaning friends--the ones who have been urging me not to pay my phone bill--are rather suspicious of even the slightest interference on the phone. They take my roommates' discreet entrances and exits on the line to be indiscretions on the part of the FBI and CIA, which have nefariously compiled files on people even more innocuous than Harvard leftists.

These friends of mine have nothing in particular to hide from the bureaus and agencies of our federal government. Nonetheless, the thought that Big Brother just might be listening in on our talks has made them nervous enough not to call me anymore.

I am therefore mad as hell at them. And in order to repay them, I decided to spend my weekly column expounding upon the absolute necessity of New England Telephone's student services, rather than urging a general boycott of the company.