Feeling: flighty
Listening to: Sense Field - Save Yourself
Reading/Watching: Test of the Twins... last hundred pages, and everyone is almost-dying! it's great.

I would not want to be the callbox outside our front gate. It seems to me that the average life expectancy can't be very high.

Six months ago, some nimrod in a U-Haul assaulted the large, brick-and-mortar-laden callbox outside the entry gate to our apartment complex. I'm not sure how it happened, or whether it was intentional, but in the morning, I left for school and the big brick suburban-mailbox-looking structure was whole. By evening, when I returned home, it was a ravaged pile of bricks with a sad little pole sticking out the bottom.

It's been missing ever since, and the gate stands open (which made the more paranoid members of our community, who paid another hundred a month or so for the "safety" of a "gated community," very antsy about how Martians would sneak in and eat our brains while we slept, all for lack of that monument of security, the old electric gate that took eighty years to slide open and closed, and often allowed three or four cars in at a time, because people would wait in the parking lot for someone who actually lived there to come by, so they could sneak in behind). We waited patiently for the callbox to be fixed.

Months later, the bricks were cleared away, and a feeble little square of metal was erected on a pole, with the same number panel for dialing in, just waiting to be programmed and safely encased in concrete. Later, two wooden poles were put in on either side of the dialing panel, I assume as guides for where the bricks were supposed to go. The corpse of the old box didn't work, though, and the gate stayed open, just daring the Martians to come by.

Some nutsy neighbor actually went ballistic and began threatening the office staff of the apartment complex, demanding that they close the gate liekomgrightnow because the Martians and rapists and burglars were coming. Then he actually pulled the gate closed himself. I have no idea how hard that must have been to do, considering it was electronically locked open, but he did it. And again, twice more, after the apartment staff opened it again. Then his arms fell off or he gave up or was sent to the funny Martian-fearing farm, because the gate stopped being closed.

And yesterday, the corpse of the callbox was violated yet again.

Some other nimrod (or possibly the same one, I don't know) smashed into one of the wooden poles on the side of the dialing panel, and smushed the metal side of the panel in, so the front popped open and swings crazily in the wind, wires and circuits all bare and colorful. It's rather like callbox entrails. Quite unsightly.

I'm beginning to think these acts of violence on the hapless callbox are actually perpetuated by the Martians themselves. They're waiting for the mother ship to get here (it's a long trip, from Mars), and they have to keep the callbox out of commission (rather like drugging the guard dogs in old grand-scale-heist movies) in order to proceed with the eating-of-brains plan.

Nimsay, I'm really hoping the dialing panel is still all guts-to-the-wind when you get back from Spain. It's so sad-looking, it's funny.

Oh, someone apparently tried to tape the box shut to protect the wires, but the tape peeled off from the months of grime on the metal, and now the tape is gathering gunk and looking weird and violated, too. The saga continues.

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