The Story of Tony

Hi All!

Story from the half-way house.

We had house meetings a couple of times a week and took the pay phone handset off the hook as that was our inbound call phone and the meetings were not to be interrupted.

The guy nearest the phone would hold the handset against his leg to muffle the beep beep off-hook signal until it went away.

One night, a fairly new guy, I'll call him Tony, became agitated with the muffled beeps. He interrupted the meeting and the following transpired:

Tony: "Hey! Push that lever down and it will go quiet."

Phone Guy: "It will just come back again."

Tony: "S--t, I'll fix it!" Jumps from chair, grabs handset and hangs it up -- upside down. "There!"

The group was silent -- he seemed pretty, um, tense and sometimes it's better not to confront someone in that state, especially given the backgrounds that got some of us there.

Soon, the phone rang. Tony turned to stare at the phone incredulously.

"It didn't do that the other day!"

Cheers!