Had no convenient way to tell friend
By Chandler Walter, Humour Editor
In tragic breaking news today, Stewart Martin, a student at Douglas College, was late to meet his friend Will Mackentosh, and had no instant and convenient way to communicate with him.
“It was crazy,” said Martin of the challenges he faced. “I called him up on our house phone to arrange a time to meet, but on the way to the local soda shop, my bus broke down half an hour away. I was stranded.”
To further Martin’s difficulty, he could not find any sort of pay phone in the area, nor had any change, even if that had been a possibility.
“The only things I had in my pockets were pencils and some string I carry around to look at or play with when I’m bored or waiting on something,” stated Martin. “Even after I decided to literally talk to the human beings around me, no one knew if another bus would be coming, or had a map handy to show me along my way.” Martin decided that his best—and only—course of action was to walk along the street that the bus was heading down, and maybe knock on a complete stranger’s door to ask if he could use their phone.
Meanwhile, Mackentosh simply sat at the soda shop waiting for his friend, for however long it would take. “That’s just what you have to do,” Mackentosh explained. “I didn’t want to leave, because what if he showed up right when I left? We literally have no way to communicate our whereabouts, here in 1976.”
It was dark by the time Martin found his way over to the soda shop, where the two friends feasted on $0.33 cheeseburgers and $0.35 milkshakes, had a meaningful conversation in which both parties stayed engaged for the entirety of the time spent together, and then parted ways.
“It was nice to see him,” said Martin, shortly after arriving home. “But what I wouldn’t give for some sort of pocket sized communications device. Hell even having a convenient map or bus timetable handy would have been nice. Oh well.”
Martin spent the rest of the night playing cards with his family, watched an hour or so of TV, read a few chapters, and then promptly went to sleep once all possible forms of entertainment had been exhausted.
