Automatic Answer

I've known for a couple of decades that there are no such thing as werewolves, swamp creatures, monsters, or any other miscellaneous evil things. However, I distinctly remember when I was younger, this knowledge was fleeting. We had one flight of 15 stairs while I was growing up in North Ogden. When I was 13 years old (or so) I remember being so extremely scared on several occasions while climbing my stairs. It was a peculiar process that I've recently discovered is pretty common among pre-teens. Here's the redundant scenario: I'm by myself at the bottom of the stairs and I decide I'm going to go upstairs for any number of reasons. As I start to slowly climb the stairs a random thought enters my head. Something like, "What if there was something chasing me? Could I beat it up the stairs or would it catch me before I got there?" Once this thought entered my head, even though I knew there wasn't anything behind me, I'd start to get kind of freaked out. By the time I was halfway up the stairs, for some reason I'd decided there could be something in pursuit and by the time I reached the top of the stairs, I was often in a full blown panic. However, once I'd reached that top step, I was fine. I'd won. Nothing had caught me. It was always a creepy feeling and, like I said, it happened to me quite often while I was growing up.

I've thought about this several times over the years and I've come to a relatively uninteresting conclusion. It seems to me that the initial thought, somehow, transforms quickly into a belief, then a knowledge. It's a rapid process. A process that doesn't only happen with monsters and stairs, I've discovered. It happens with other things, as well.

It happened to my wife not to long ago. I had left work early one afternoon and decided to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few items for dinner. I decided to leave my cellphone ear piece in my ear just in case my wife called. Once I'd entered the store, I looked around and starting to feel pretty stupid. I was walking around the store with an earbud in my left ear and a black wire coming out of the earbud, clipped to the front of my shirt, and then enter my left front pants pocket. I pulled the earbud out of my ear, unclipped the... clip, and put the entire contraption into my pocket. I did this so quickly that I forgot I had enabled the "automatic answer" option on my phone.

So as I'm walking around the store I don't notice when my wife, Betsy, calls. My phone rings once in my pocket and then my phone answers the call without my knowledge. My wife is on the other end of the call and, remember, she thinks I should still be at work. Betsy can hear the sound of the earpiece microphone rubbing against the inside of my pocket as well as some muffled conversation taking place between other customers who happen to be shopping down the "Frozen Entree" isle with me. My wife is unable to hear much of anything, but for some reason she thinks, "Why isn't Cameron at work? It doesn't sound like he's at work? Where could he be? That sounds like a girl laughing. I wonder if he's at a girls house and they're having sex." Well... as soon as the thought of an extra-marital affair enters her head, everything else she hears seems to fit into this mental scenario she's envisioning.

Everything that happens over the next 4 minutes confirms over and over in Betsy's mind that I must be cheating on her. She hears the produce sprayer turn on and it sounds like I'm whispering... probably in a hot girls ear while I'm making kissing sounds while breathing a little heavy. (Betsy tells me all this later while almost in tears.) She even hears a small child say to a parent "I love you" when really the child could have said, "Can I have Cap'n Crunch instead of Trix?"... it didn't matter. Betsy is hearing what she wants because she KNOWS at this point that I must be "getting it on" with a co-worker. Then, and this is my favorite part, she hears the beeping from the scanning of my items and thinks it's bed springs squeaking at sexual intervals. Seriously.

Betsy tells me later there was a point when she stopped trying to decipher what she was hearing and started trying to figure out how she was going to confront me and whether she'd stay with her parents, would she take the kids with her, and could she ultimately stay married to me. How could she not have suspected something? Had I been acting differently lately?

While I'm in the checkout line I think to myself, I wonder if my phone answers automatically if my earpiece is plugged in. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and notice that Betsy has been connected to my phone for about 4 minutes. I hurry and put my earpiece in my ear and say, "Hey, honey." You can imagine what she was thinking receiving a greeting like that while she's positive I'm naked, laying next to someone I've probably mentioned to her at some point while talking about work. She says, "Where are you?" "I'm at the store picking up a couple things. Did you say something about wanting apples, cause I think we still have some in the bottom right drawer in the fridge." "I'll see you when you get home." she says.

I don't think Betsy FULLY believed me until I got home 5 minutes later carrying grocery bags. She almost started crying (in fact, she might have actually cried) while explaining her thought process during the entire phone call. I started laughing about halfway through it, but she didn't find any of it funny at the time. She was relieved, but she felt pretty silly for thinking I'd cheat on her. It was just one of those things that pops into your head and you can't get it out... kinda like being chased up a flight of stairs.

We already had apples, by the way.