X

Diary Entry: January 21, 2025

So, the day of my great surrender has finally arrived. I have decided to get an American phone number. Professor Pigou can finally rest; his personal crusade, waged since my arrival, is nearing its end.

I remember the opening salvo back in late summer. He was chauffeuring me to a burger bar — the only appropriate venue, apparently, to discuss the finer points of bankruptcy — when he launched into his favorite sermon: The Gospel of the Local Number.

I tried to explain my profound attachment to my old number. It was a work of art, a beautiful sequence playing on Yakuza numerology. It couldn’t really handle calls, sure, but it could send and receive texts with a certain international mystique. It was my man-of-mystery number, and I wasn’t ready to give it up. He, however, was fixated on needing a “reliable source of communication.” I almost listed off the other ways to reach me — email, Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, and, you know, the very SMS service on the phone he so despised — but he had that glazed, locked-in look of a man on a mission.

My real reason for holding out, of course, was the monthly $40 tribute one must pay for the privilege of existing on the American cellular plane. A fee that, naturally, doesn’t even include a “reliable” amount of internet.

But the final straw? Job applications. It seems one cannot properly grovel for employment in this country without a 10-digit identifier to prove you’re one of them. So, for the sake of future, hypothetical paychecks, I marched off to do my civic duty.

And, in a perfect punchline delivered by the cosmos itself, the phone store was closed.

I came back. The quest continues tomorrow, I suppose.