Like a broken record

Third shift was a fact of life for Jim when I met him, and for a few years after we were married. He was head of night stock in a grocery store, and I was pretty resigned to the fact that he wouldn't be there at night. I bounced around between all three shifts at Meijer when we were first married; the really fun weeks were the ones where I would work all three shifts within five days. Tell me that didn't do some permanent damage to my bearings.

A lot of nights during the summer, I'd come home from second shift and just sleep on the couch. That way I wouldn't have to tear myself away from Nick at Nite as I fell under the sandman's spell. I'd often drift off to dreamland with the theme from Mr. Ed swimming laps around my fishbowl mind. I never could figure out why I used to have those nightmares about giant, speckled penises talking to me.

On one such night, and I'm not sure if I was having the speckled dream or not, the phone rang not long after I'd gone to sleep, maybe 3 a.m. or so. It wasn't uncommon for Jim to call me from work, so I just assumed it would be him on the line when I picked up. This was long before we had the greatest invention of mankind attached to our phone, and I'm sure I don't have to tell you that I mean Caller ID. But this was the olden, blind-faith-in-the-fucker-on-the-other-end phone answering days, and I answered with a sleep-roughened "Hullo?"

A husky whisper on the other end made a rather blunt sexual suggestion to me. Aha, I thought, waking up ever so slightly, Jim wants to be cute. So I played along.

"Yeah, baby, that sounds great, uh huh," I replied in my best imitation of bottom-of-the-barrel porn acting. Uh, you know, or so I've heard.

The husky whisperer, obviously heartened by my cooperation, kept repeating the same request over and over, and after a few iterations, I was frankly tiring of the game. If you're gonna wake me up and talk dirty, at least be creative, fer chrissake! My patience for the whole thing was waning, and I snapped, "Okay, what did you call for?"

Same whispered blunt request.

I realized, late as usual, that this was not Jim on the other end of the obscene, and to be brutally honest, unimaginative phone call.

After I hung up on the lonesome noodle plucker, I realized that I was more offended by the utter lack of preparation than anything else. Really, guys, if you're gonna call a woman, disguise your identity, and talk the filty talk to her, please at least write up a list of talking points before you take the phone in your left hand and the mayonnaise in your right.

It's the right thing to do.