blogwaffe

Allen posed a problem to me many have faced before. He was on the phone with a friend of his when his call was dropped*. He called back, but so did his friend and apparently at just the right time such that each reached only the other’s voice mail rather than the other’s actual self. In comedic fashion, this dialing around in circles happened multiple times. Frustration abounded.

The solution, he believes, is the development of a universally known and agreed upon protocol for how to reestablish a broken telephone conversation (be it cellular or landlinear).

I am here to state the optimal such protocol. You are here to read it, accept it, and follow it unconditionally.

The telephone post-disconnect redialing protocol for two parties

Whoever dialled that specific call must redial the call if the connection is lost, unless otherwise explicitly agreed upon by both parties during the course of that specific call.

The question is one of who should call whom. The above is optimal (for the appropriate definition of optimal) due to the following considerations.

1. The caller should not put financial burden on the callee.
2. The callee may not know the phone number of the caller, while it is clear the caller has access to the number of the callee.
3. There is no mention of alternate Tuesdays or the color of either party’s socks.

Go forth and propagate this decree unto the masses.

* Information is passed from cell phone to cell phone by electromagnetic waves cleverly encoding digital information in a fault tolerant and secure fashion such that your voice gets through with reasonable clarity to the party on the other end of the “line” without anyone else being able to listen in. These electromagnetic waves are simply a fancy technical sounding word for “cell phone fairies”. These eager, though sometimes clumsy, creatures occasionally drop your voice as they carry it from one phone to another, hence the term.