She wanted out of it, and the best way to be out of it was to turn the phones off. It might give the impression of anti-sociality, or desire to get off the Grid -- she was not angling for a unibomber position in any case-- but it was the right thing to do. She hoped that by becoming inconveniently unavailable, they would see that being on call 24X7X60 was an unfair proposition. In view of her real mortality and lack of remaining days, her sleep was becoming sacrosanct and this strategy was the forgone conclusion to her years of labor for the Man.
The apartment's landline was equipped with a 'Block' to eliminate repeated solicitations from well-meaning (or not) arts organizations and welfare societies, but this technique would mean she would never get the call again, which was much too final for this situation. For the Indian calls, the 'Do Not Disturb' mode sufficed. They would call in the middle of the night and it wouldn't ring: so that whatever little problem had surfaced and attracted the attention of the call center in Bangalore, she could continue in her dreaming state. In the morning she could see who she had snubbed by checking the digital history. On this particular morning, she saw that "Bound Brook NJ" had called at 2 am and she felt a mixture of shame and triumph over the Corporate animal that tried to rob her of her sleep and clutter her brain with its trivia. After all, they were lying. They were not in Bound Brook. What was the point of this subterfuge? It was like renaming Calcutta to Kolkata, but without removing the Colonial after-taste.
The other intrusion on a decent, peace-loving life was the buzz and jazz of the cell phone. She had easily turned it off, but detested turning it on again and getting the call alert. Besides "Bound Brook" (which by the way, was a charming little town in New Jersey that is on the way to somewhere else), there would likely be a slew of messages from her superiors wondering what was going on. The answers to these calls would determine whether she could be gotten out of it once and for all, or whether they would be pacified and just keep holding the rope and circling, yanking her around to deal with the next business exigency, all of premium importance and priority. Never mind that the rest of the country was mostly impoverished by their business rules, or that the unbridled push towards Globalization was sending unemployment statistics north of ten percent. She read the reports of middle-class slide into lower-class, she looked at the number and thought it might swell by 1 or 2 after she was done with this campaign. Perhaps she would move to Bound Brook; or was that Bangalore?
