I’ve never been a big fan of talking on the phone. When I was younger, most of my friends delighted in nightly gab fests about the mundane details of their day, and all of them somehow synchronized their calls to ring the instant I’d set the phone down at the end of the previous conversation. Every so often, when I couldn’t stand the thought of another wasted night, I’d have the phone company change my number. “Sorry,” I’d explain when I ran into a friend who complained about not being able to reach me, “I haven’t memorized my new number yet. But I’ll call you!”

Yeah, right.

I was elated when answering machines first came out since the let me enjoy quiet evenings at home without my friends ever realizing that I was avoiding them. Of course, every so often I actually had to return a phone call, but if I waited until late enough at night even my most talkative friend would be in a hurry to get off the phone and go to sleep.

Caller ID blew my answering machine away. With no outgoing message obligating me to call back, I could scroll through the list of recently missed calls and choose whom — if anyone — I was in the mood to talk to. The rest I called back at their work number — after-hours, leaving a voice mail to say “Hi!” That way I scored friendship points without having to endure the detailed accountings of every conversation they had with each and every person in their office that day, followed by a similarly excruiciating psychoanalysis of their current boyfriend/husband/lover’s flaws and a diatribe about whichever fad diet they were following that week.

Then one day, I got found out.

My friend Lisa had been going through a nasty breakup with her boyfriend of 7 years. During the two weeks leading up to her decision to dump him, I spent every night on the phone with her as she listed all of his flaws, his moral failures, his dirty little habits, et cetera. The night she kicked him out of their apartment, I listened as she tearfully wondered if she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. The following week I spent every evening saying “Oh, no” and “I know, but it’s going to be all right” as she described how her ex-boyfriend had begun stalking her, how he left pleading messages on her machine, how he threatened to kill himself.

I came home one night to find my apartment eerily silent. It took a while to figure out why: my phone wasn’t ringing. Out of concern, I called Lisa but got no answer. I figured that was a good sign. Maybe she went out to a movie. Maybe she went shopping. Maybe she’d gone to some other friend’s house and was crying on their shoulder, instead of mine. Feeling more than a little relieved, I climbed into my sweats and snuggled on the sofa with a book I’d been trying to read for the past month. Page One — the doorbell rang. It was Lisa.

Turns out, the boyfriend had a key to the apartment so, while Lisa was taking a shower, he simply let himself in and unpacked his things. It all made perfect sense since his name was on the lease, or at least that’s what the landlord explained to Lisa when he said she’d have to stop throwing her boyfriend’s things off the balcony because their neighbors were starting to complain. So Lisa figured that since I’d been soooo supportive, decided to come stay with me. For a week, she said. Two at the tops.

During the three months Lisa lived with me, she never went an evening without the phone glued to her ear. It was a blessing, in a way, since that meant I didn’t get any calls (No, I don’t believe in Call Waiting, thank you) and so I didn’t have to return any calls, either.

I guess Lisa must have worn out all of her other friends’ ears, too, because there came a night when she gave up dialing numbers and sat down next to me, waiting for me to look up from my book. That very instant, the phone rang. She started to lunge for it and I jumped to block her path. “Don’t answer it,” I said. “I’ll find out who it is from Caller ID and decide if I want to call them back.” Lisa gave me a quiet, small-eyed stare.

When I checked the readout and saw the number of my newly-divorced friend, June, I groaned. I was so not ready to sign up for another month of hand-holding a suddenly single girlfriend. So, I dialed June’s work number and left a breezy message along the lines of how I’d been thinking about her and how we should get together so why doesn’t she call me sometime soon? I hung up and turned to find Lisa staring at me with beady little eyes and a very red face.

“Is that how you always managed to call me at work so coincidentally when I’d just called you? Is that why you never answer your phone? YOU’RE A CALL SCREENER!!!” (The latter screamed at the top of her lungs as if I’d just cut the head off of her pet bunny with a weed whacker.)

She moved out that night. From what I could piece together in the following week, she moved straight in with June and told her about me being a Call Screener. Then June told Nancy, who’d been trying (unsuccessfully) to reach me to tell me all about her latest feud with her mother, and Nancy told Liz, who wanted to update me about her recent homeopathic therapy for Lyme disease, then Liz told Gina, who had just had a nose job that left her looking worse off than before, and so on and so on. Soon I was blacklisted by every female I’d ever known.

But at least my phone stopped ringing.

Now here I am, 20 years older, and I still hate phones. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, having a telephone is considered a sign of social responsibility, and refusing to give out your phone number is considered a sign of anti-social tendencies. (As if there’s something wrong with that.) So, I have a phone. And my friends have the number. And I hate that because the damned thing rings.

My friend Misha calls every couple of days. No, she has nothing in particular to say, but that doesn’t stop her. She’s a transplanted-Brooklynite through and through, and that means that whenever she’s telling a story, the slightest little response from me like “Oh wow!” or “How awful!” prompts her to exclaim: “Wait, you don’t understand! Let me tell you!” after which she starts at the very beginning all over again. These days, Misha mostly talks about her strange health ailments — all of which sound incredibly painful, and for each of which she’s been prescribed huge amounts of pain medication — which means that I no longer even have to say “Oh wow!” to send her back to the very beginning of her story all over again. (I tested this the other day by setting the phone down while she was in mid-sentence so I could go to the bathroom. Sure enough, when I returned she was starting at beginning again.)

Of course, if I don’t call Misha back every third time she calls, I get a message threatening to “cut me out” for ignoring her. Damned if she doesn’t call three times in a day, though.

Then there’s my other friend, Serena. She doesn’t call that often, but she’s always with a crowd when she does. And, since she’s single and likes to club hop, she’s usually calling me in the evenings from a noisy bar where the music’s backbeat drowns out every other word she’s saying. Not that she says a lot, mind you. Mostly, she tells me to hold on while she has conversations with everyone else around her. If she’s had enough to drink, she’ll altogether forget that she’s on the phone with me. Nowdays I hang up whenever she has me “on hold” for more than 2 minutes. I learned my lesson after that one evening when I wasted a half-hour waiting for her to come back to the phone.

Considering how much I hate telephones, would you believe my husband gave me a cell phone for my birthday last month? And, would you believe, I love it? Of course, he didn’t give me just any ol’ phone. He gave me a Treo — complete with web-browser, digital camera, PDA functions and (best of all) unlimited text messaging!

How strange is it that my friends have all thanked him almost as profusely as I did?