Public service announcement

Actually it’s more of a self-serving announcement, but all the same:

I got a text message and a voice mail today, both telling me to call me asap. It turned out to be a matter of small alarm—not good, but not major; good to know, nothing to freak out over. All intentions were good, and so far as this person knew, so were all the actions. I don’t blame people for making mistakes when they had no way of knowing they are mistakes—but with me, this sort of is one.

Since I have been notified of the deaths of one immediate family member (genetic distance ½) and one close family member (¼) by phone calls, and the death of a good friend via email, I tend to be very sensitive to alarming communications, and when I get a vague­-but-ominous message like that (something bad happen, call me to find out) there’s a not insignificant part of my brain that immediately expects that someone died, or at least something bad enough happened that the first thing I’ll hear is Are you sitting down?

This is my over-sensitivity, but if you have to alert me of something bad that isn’t a huge deal, please make your text message say something like Please call me—it isn’t a catastrophe, but I need to tell you something. I thank you on behalf of my negatively-conditioned responses.