Question: My (insert relation here) Fats,

As someone who has known you for more than 5 minutes but considerably less than 83 years, I'm fairly confident you can help me.  I recently bought a cell phone, but I'm afraid of long exposure to talking on it.  Not cancer or brain degredation caused by said phone, but by inane conversations I now endure as my friends seem to love calling me now.  Although I bought it mainly for texting, I find myself talking on the phone more than ever.  Please help me...

Should I ditch the phone or get more exciting friends?  Or should I get counseling for being a bad friend?

~ Pilford Anbergorlte

 

Hmm, I get to insert the relation, eh Pilford?  Okay, I think the new start of your letter is as follows: "Question: My person who I'm the president of their fan club Fats," as you are, as you may well know, the president of my fan club.  Speaking of which, I should be shipping you a new supply of Fats-Brand Asbestos®, a questionable new food product/toy that I'm hoping you will spread and sample among the crew.  Your feedback, as always, is invaluable in helping me avoid lawsuits.

It is no surprise that I despise the telephone.  There are few inventions that rival the telephone in terms of ushering in a propensity for rudeness and blathering.  In fact, the only one I can think of that greater promotes blathering would be the political pundit round-table discussion, which is not so much an invention as a bane.  I have a few hand-selected shoes I'd like to throw at political pundit round-table discussion.  But the telephone is indeed an evil creation.  As it stands, there are only three people who have Fats' personal cell phone number: my mother, my assistant Tendrils, and Jessica Tandy after a long night of A-List Celebrity partying when Fats had mistakenly confused Jessica Tandy and Jessica Alba.  Fortunately, Fats has, to this date, still not received a call.

Obviously, the telephone is singlehandedly responsible for the precipitous decline of social judgment.  People think it's okay to talk on the phone during restaurant dinners, masses, and oral sex.  But just because everyone else is an idiot doesn't mean you need to be to.  The first thing you can do to prevent talking on the phone with The Blathering Masses (whose new album, I Got Fixed For You, drops next Tuesday) is to limit the possibility of you answering it.  First off, start with an annoying ringtone.  I recommend a short audio clip of a baby crying, or worse yet, a short audio clip of modern country music.  Anything by Brad Paisley should suffice.  In extreme situations, set any state of the union address from the last 5 years as your ringtone.  If your telelphone rings with these noises blaring and you don't instantly do everything in your power to turn your phone off, then I can't help you.  You can also resist temptation from answering your phone by increasing the power of your vibration setting from 'vibrate' to 'electrocute.' This should eliminate any desire to even have your phone in the same county as you.

But assuming you actually need your phone for certain things (911, phone sex), then I would suggest another way to prohibit people from trying to talk to you all the time.  Fake your own death.  For some reason, if you simply stop ANSWERING the phone, people will call you MORE.  I don't know about you, but if I went to the supermarket and they stopped selling Screaming Yellow Zonkers, I would stop going to the store for my Screaming Yellow Zonkers.  But people aren't as smart as me.  They will call you MORE frequently the less you answer.  So set the record straight: you are dead.  What usually helps is if you have close contacts in the police department and at least one relative who works for a funeral home.  They can do a pretty convincing job of legally killing you without the hassle or pain of actually doing so.  Go for something sorta unbelievable, because the mundanity of a "car accident" will only make the bereavement process worse for all involved, and you don't want to hurt your friends, you just never want to speak to them again.  So say you got hit by a helicopter, or you eroded. 

I know that sounds like work, so you may want a final method to avoid the blathering of your friends.  This involves finding Stephen Hawking and stealing his neat typing-to-voice translator.  I'm sure someone on Craig's List can modify that to work with a cell phone.  That way, when someone calls, they'll NEVER see it coming when you tell them in a wholly-realistic sounding voice: "Ibn to call of of.  Pilford" (I'm assuming it's cold and you're texting with mittens on.)  That way you don't need to even talk, and after a few conversations like that and being called a 'fpinboof', your friends will just give up, rather assuming you have become retarded.  

I don't have coal this year to fill up any stockings, so I'm passing out knowledge.  And man, you better have a pretty large stocking to soak up all that I expunge.  Like if you have a bathtub that you can paint up like a stocking, or just a thick PVC pipe that's about 1250' long.  I could fill that.  In the meantime, write in with your questions and I will keep the holiday spirit of giving alive (even if it's presently in a coma.)