The Insane Species

Although the hot, humid air made her hair stick limply to the back of her neck, Lisa ignored it as she carried on a phone conversation with her ISP's technical support on her cell. Her DSL was not working yet again, and she needed access to the Internet right now. Remote login to the computers at the office seemed great until she had no Internet access, and she lived five hundred miles away from the building where said computers lived. Lisa needed to test her code on her employer's computers to ensure that it worked.

Her precious work time faded away as Technical Support passed her from one person to another. She spent most of her time on hold, and the music they played on the line just made her even angrier. It sounded so awful that she didn't bother matching it to a genre of music. While on hold, she chewed her tasteless sandwich and cheered on the developing storm because it seemed to sympathize with her.

After forty five minutes on the line, Lisa had gotten nowhere with Customer Service. She would soon be switching ISPs regardless of the consequences of breaking her current contract, but this wouldn't happen in the next few days.

Right now, she had a job to complete that she could not complete. Lisa finally had the time to vacuum her carpet. Or she could just chuck the cell phone out on to the lawn.

Stand up. Loosen up the shoulder a bit, bring the arm back, aim the ball, and...release!

The cell phone flew through the air and slid for a few seconds across the lawn. The wrinkles in the plastic bag around the cell phone (which had contained her lunch earlier) probably added friction or stopping power or whatever one wanted to call it. For a few seconds, she only grinned madly as rain began to fall. The rain threatened to drench everything on the ground.

Lisa felt more relaxed just being off the cell phone, even if this did nothing to solve her present problem.

Something moved across the lawn and caught her attention. The plastic bag and the cell phone within it shakily ascended three-some feet in the air on their own. Lisa blinked, looked again through the rain, and saw that a set of blue jeans framed the "floating" cell phone. She then broadened her scope of vision to include the person who had picked up the cell phone. He scorned the rain gods' gift by hiding from the downpour underneath a broad college-themed umbrella. She didn't recognize this member of the sane species, so she supposed his apartment existed somewhere on the other side of complex opposite hers.

She could almost hear him devising a hypothesis to explain why he had found a cell phone on the ground. This thoroughly drenched woman must own the abused cell phone. She had thrown it because she was having a breakdown or throwing a tantrum.

They watched each other for a few seconds, and Lisa took the initiative to retrieve her cell phone. On another day, Lisa would be thinking, Dear Lord, this is embarrassing, but she had no energy to drum up an appropriate reaction. The residents of Lisa's building already knew her to be nocturnal eccentric, so why not let that reputation spread throughout the apartment complex?