You know that scene from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan where Kirk, in outrage at Khan for abandoning him on a lifeless asteroid, looks up into the camera and shouts, “Khaaaaan!!!”? It’s practically become part of the cultural vernacular, with Jon Stewart and others picking up on it. Well, I kind of feel like I have my own Khan, on a much more trivial and whiny scale.

You know how it is when you get a new phone number assigned and the number you get is someone else’s that has been out of service for maybe three months? You’d expect to get a few people calling it now and then, but most should have figured it out in those first three months.

Apparently, the guy who had my number before me–Sugishima, how well I have come to know that name–gave that number to several thousand people, or so it would seem, and notified not one of them that he changed his number. For the first six months I had the number, I was getting more than one call a day on average, and even now I get a call for him once every month or so. And it has been more than five years since I got this number.

Yeah, I know. I should have switched the number early on. But a combination of procrastination and wishful thinking made me never get around to it. So I still find myself occasionally setting aside what I’m doing and answering the phone, each time going to effort that this idiot Sugishima sloughed off on the next unlucky schmoe who got his number. It’s time like this that I have to remind myself that retribution is unhealthy and immoral, because the thought of getting a thousand people to call his new number asking for my name day and night is so appealing. Kind of like the people who run around the neighborhood blasting noise from their loudspeaker trucks–as is happening this very moment outside my window–when you’d love to get your own loudspeaker truck, follow these people to their homes, and then sit outside all day blasting the latest Hip-hop hits into their windows when they’re trying to enjoy a quiet evening at home.

Why is everything fun so wrong?