It was 2005, so the phone’s name was spelled in all capitals, it lacked a vowel, and ok it was a RAZR. I was barely using it - such as you could anyway - at my job, because the job was at a call center. In case you’ve never worked at a call center: hundreds of people rotated daily through fabric cubiclettes belonging to no one, smoke-beige phone handles connected to dead boxes connected to semi-legal dialer servers, miniature crystal-ball screens burned with green text, half-gallon containers of coffee from 7-Eleven, oily headsets shared between strangers, smell of hand sanitizer and Lean Cuisine, part-time employees either years in the same position or about to walk out the door.
I forgot my phone here one evening, rushing out the door to make it to a midnight screening of Rocky Horror (don’t ask) so I had to rush back about an hour later before they paused the server and unpaused the workers. It was left at the front desk - a miracle of man’s kindness to fellow man given that we’re talking about a place of business with an extremely forgiving hiring policy, where lunches left in the communal fridge are more likely than not to grow legs, and clouds of habitual pot fog the back parking lot.
I picked up the phone and headed out. Out of silly habit, I clicked through its menus - all twelve hundred or so - to make sure it was ok, and I ended my checkup by scrolling through the contacts. This was 2002 so I didn’t have that many numbers in my phone, making it easy to notice that I now had a new entry in my address book. Under M.
M for Muff Diver. The name was Muff Diver.
M. Diver had a local phone number, but sadly, no picture or other details. He hadn’t used my phone to make any calls - provided that it was indeed Mr. Diver (Mrs. Diver?) who had used it, and not, say, a friend of his or hers - and nothing else looked to be disturbed. Just a calling card, an introduction, a hey-give-me-a-ring.
Did he think - he, clearly he - that I was perhaps a sexy lady, and that one of those nights I would come home from my call-center job, legs asleep and butt sore, coffee heartburn and computer migraine, and I would lie on my red satin sheets in my lonely, lonely Florida house, and the A/C would be out for some reason and I’d perspire in the sexy way, and lying there with nothing better to do I would think to myself, you know, I could really use a good muff-diving right about now.
I didn’t call, partly because it could’ve all been a prank on me, and partly because it could’ve not been a prank. I worked at the call center for another year or so, and often I’d look around wondering: which one of you is it? Is it you, Cuban guy with amazing horsetail hair? The sulking high school kid who doesn’t engage in banter, relishing his angst eight unsocial hours a day? You, lady whose other job is phone sex - no, you’d be the last to be it. How about frighteningly obese Brooklyn accent over there? Are you still here, or have you left? Is it you, too polite and too sharply dressed man in his fifties? Or you, guy who reads Dostoevsky on his lunch break? Which one of you is Muff Diver?
