Side Note: Those hands-free mobile phone headsets? They’re very good at transmitting the caller’s voice, and also at voiding out most background noise like traffic, other passengers in your car, and the radio.
Once Upon A Time, there was this guy I liked. Giving you some background but maintaining his privacy, he’s a fairly successful local musician/singer/songwriter, and you can buy his albums on CDBaby and eMusic and iTunes and Amazon. For the rest of this story, remember that he’s a professional singer.
Okay, so we’re hanging out at his place one night, and he asks if he can kiss me. Asks. If he had just leaned in and DONE it, that would have been one thing. But no, he asks. Now, I had only very recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend, so I was still reeling from that. And even though I WANTED to kiss this guy, I fumbled and sputtered and told him “not yet” and blathered out some incoherent, long-winded explanation and when the dust settled and I wanted to curl up into a ball and die, we continued to stay in touch. I wasn’t sure if I’d blown it or not.
But that’s not the embarrassing part. Oh, no.
One night, I’m driving a coworker/friend home from the office. There is an AMAZING moon on the horizon, and I pop in my headset, flip open my phone, and call this guy to alert him to go outside. I get his voicemail. I leave a quick message, and flip the phone shut. My pal in the car and I start singing “I see the moon and the moon sees me…” and when we’re all done with the song, maybe a couple of times, we turn on the radio, where we start singing along with Linda Ronstadt, belting out “When Will I Be Loved.” I’m pretty sure that we got through the whole song by the time I hear my phone beep, and realize that my headset is still in my ear. And discover that my phone does NOT hang up the call when you flip it shut if the headset is plugged in. And that I have just left a 10-minute voicemail serenading this guy, asking When Will I Be Loved. Because he CANNOT HEAR the radio, or my passenger, and does not know that any of this was unintentional.
I never heard from him again.
