I'm not ready to leave the intriguing subject of choosing my favorite something by pressing a button on the keypad of the telephone. If you remember, to choose a security question, my investment company gave me the option of pressing one for my best friend from high school, pressing two for my favorite restaurant, pressing three for my favorite pet, and so on.
Wouldn't this be a great premise for a story?
Let us say one could choose one's best friend from high school by pressing a button on a keypad. Would having a different best friend change one's life significantly? If I had been best friends with one of the popular kids would I have been popular, chosen a different college that was closer to home, made a suicide pact with said best friend if we didn't get in the sorority we wanted?
Or say, I press five. I get to choose which street I lived on in high school. I choose the swanky neighborhood, of course. This means my parents are no longer my parents (because, after all, I pressed the street button-five- and not the family button-let's say that is six). The parents don't come with the new neighborhood. I wake up living in a gated community on the East side of town and, wow! I have a pool in my back yard. My new parents are jerks. They pressure me to be super student with many extra-curricular activities thereby padding my resume so I can get into an Ivy league college. You can imagine how much my Southern accent will be appreciated by those pompous asses at Snob U., so I decide to have a suicide pact with my best friend who was living next door to me in my new house. Unfortunately, she was only pretending to like me because she never thought I fit it quite right, so she only pretends to kill herself. Of course, since she did me wrong, I have to haunt her.
What other life choices might we alter just by pressing a number on a keypad? Could I choose, say, Johnny Depp as my mate by pressing 8? Could I then press another number if Johnny didn't work out? Would I need to press 9 to have Johnny make his own suicide pact with his skank friend who loitered in our mansion 24/7?
Well, this has been a morbid exercise. I think I'll go unplug the phone.
Best Selling Romance Author Jennifer Johnson
