The Call

The best travel companions reveal themselves long before you ever take a trip together.

Brendan and I were students at Monash University. The subject is lost to time — something serious, probably law, the kind of lecture where silence and decorum were expected and largely delivered.

My good friend Cheney and I had a plan.

The night before we had taken a phone, turned the volume to maximum, selected a ringtone I will describe only as deeply inappropriate for any public setting, locked the entire device inside a CD case, wrapped it in several layers of sticky tape and placed it deep inside Brendan’s bag.

Brendan went to the lecture. We did not.

We stood outside in the corridor, faces pressed to the small window in the door, and we waited.

Then we made the call.

The ringtone erupted through the lecture theatre at a volume that stopped everything. The lecturer stopped mid-sentence. Every head turned. Brendan — to his credit — immediately began searching his bag with the focused urgency of a man who understood exactly what was at stake and absolutely could not get to the phone.

The CD case and the sticky tape saw to that.

For what felt like several minutes but was probably thirty seconds, an entire university lecture was held hostage by a ringtone that had no business being anywhere near a seat of learning, while Brendan fought desperately and unsuccessfully with plastic casing and layer after layer of tape.

We watched all of this through the small window in the door.

I have not laughed like that before or since.

Brendan eventually retrieved the phone. The lecture resumed. The looks he received from his fellow students are, I am told, still vivid in his memory.

He has forgiven us. Mostly.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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