ever-fixed mark

When I call my primary care physician, nine times out of ten I get a busy signal. It must be the only phone in Massachusetts, business or residential, that doesn’t have call waiting. Back in the day, when busy signals were common, I wasn’t making business phone calls; it wasn’t that much of an inconvenience to call my sixth-grade best friend back. Now it’s supremely annoying, because I either have to hit redial until the call goes through, or remember to make the call at a later time (when I’m just as likely to get a busy signal).

I’ve tried to express my irritation, in a gentle sort of way, to the receptionist when I finally do make contact. “Something must be wrong with your phones,” I say. “I’ve been trying to get through all morning, and I keep getting a busy signal.”

“The phones have been really busy,” she says.

“Yes, but there only seems to be one line open,” I say, “and the voice mail don’t seem to be working.”

“Oh, I don’t think we have that,” she says. “We just answer the phones.”

Right.

So the last time we had this conversation, the nurse practitioner I was calling was not available, and I asked the receptionist if she could call me back. She asked to confirm my phone numbers.

“Home is still 5-1234?” she said. “And work is still 5-6789?”

It took me a little while to follow, but presently I realized she was assuming the first two numbers of the local exchange and confirming just the third number of the exchange and the final four numbers. Back in the fifties, where my doctor’s office is apparently temporally located, everyone in town had a phone number that started with “46.” Many phone numbers still start with “46,” but there are new local exchanges and cell phones located in different area codes so you can no longer assume that the local area code applies, let alone the local exchange.

Husband said, “I’m surprised she didn’t ask you if your number was still ‘Klondike 5-1234.’” That inspired me to Google what the two-letter exchange code actually was, and that’s how I found this. We’re HOmestead-5. I’m definitely going to start doling out my phone number that way.

This morning, as I was listening to my new favorite radio station, I heard “Valerie Plame,” a new song by the Decemberists. It was pop-y and sweet, like one of those sixties’ girl-name songs, but with topically relevant lyrics (”Hey, Valerie Plame/If that’s your real name”). As I listened to the tale of the CIA agent who became a household word, I suddenly realized that I’ve never told the Internets about the time I applied for a job with the CIA. It’s a story in three acts, and each act features (bien sur) a different guy.

Act 1 opens my senior year of college, when I had a part-time job as an aerobics instructor at a health club. Wait, wait: that statement gives such a false picture of me, I have to digress a bit to explain how I found myself in that position. I had been hired to work the front desk, a job well within my capabilities (take membership card, hang on hook, take locker key off hook, hand to patron). Then my roommate, let’s call her Jenna, also got hired to take some front desk shifts. The club manager developed a thing for Jenna, and I suppose she thought her chances of enticing her into a threesome with her and her boyfriend would be improved if Jenna were at the front desk more often, so I was moved downstairs to the workout area, where I became the most incompetent aerobics teacher in history.

No one can teach do leg lifts to Huey Lewis and the News for a whole eight-hour shift, so in my down time I was assigned to the weight room. One of my co-workers was a man with the last name of Bond; we’ll call him Steve, just in case he is Googling himself. Steve Bond. We always referred to him by both names: “Is Steve Bond working today?” “I saw Steve Bond at the Gingerbread Man on Saturday night.” Steve Bond was thirty, divorced, and ripped. Steve Bond drove a Camaro. Steve Bond had reddish hair and a big Tom Selleck mustache. In every way, Steve Bond was thoroughly different than the Theta Chis I had been dating, and I soon developed a huge crush on him, which thrived on long hours spent with him in the weight room, chatting about this and that in between Nautilus appointments.

Since this was my senior year, I was trying to decide what I would do with the rest of my life. I was an English major who spoke a little German, and was therefore qualified only for positions as 1. Nanny 2. Yellow page salesperson in Amish country or 3. Government service. I applied to take the CIA test, which was scheduled to be given near my college during the winter break. During one of my long shifts at the health club, I learned that Steve Bond was also applying for a government position, as a cartographer, and his exam was being offered on the same day as mine.

This was a sign from the gods that we were meant to be together, the break I had been waiting for. I asked Steve Bond for a ride to the exam, and I vowed I would parlay a shared trip to Harrisburg into a closer connection that — who knows? — might end in the two of us moving to D.C. together after graduation. So I drove up to college during winter break, spent the night of my birthday in my sorority apartment, and waited out on the curb the next morning for Steve Bond to pick me up in his Camaro. We were both wearing formal suits, because that’s what you did in the eighties, even if you were just going to sit for an exam where no one with hiring authority was within a hundred-mile radius.

I don’t remember too much about the day except my thrill at being alone in a car with Steve Bond, and what seemed like forty consecutive multiple choice personality tests. I don’t think there was one item about the gross national product of Burundi or the political situation in the Middle East, but I responded to seven variations on the question, “Do you like tall women?” with either “Strongly Agree, Somewhat Agree, Agree, Somewhat Disagree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree.” (I am a tall woman. What does any of those answers say about me?) I imagined that all those tests would successfully separate the bold, adventurous, resourceful, innovative candidates from the dull, plodding chaff. I’ve since realized that the CIA is built on dull and plodding. Their ideal candidate is respectful of authority and unlikely to engage in any behavior that would leave her open to blackmail.

On the way home, I told Steve Bond that the previous day had been my birthday.

“And you were up here all by yourself? You should have given me a call.”

I was gobsmacked. Steve Bond? Would have taken me out on my birthday?! I spent the whole ride trying to come up with some follow-up that would get him to ask me out that night, but I had nothing. With every mile I could see our future together in a cute little apartment in Georgetown receding further into the distance.

If I could travel back in time I would go back to that day and kick my own ass. Any twenty-one year old girl in the best physical condition of her life who couldn’t figure out how to put the moves on a thirty-year-old newly divorced man doesn’t deserve a college diploma, much less a career in our country’s intelligence service.