The Lemming Preservation Society

I have reached an age where, with the exception of new technology, many, many, many things pull up images from my past. Some of these gentle nudges, make me waste time on things I never meant to ever think about again, but other's come from so far out of left field, that I explode in laughter in celebration of their stupidity.

Lucky for you, dear readers, this post is about one of the latter.

First of all, for any younger readers, can you imagine a time when the phone rang, the person answering it had no idea who was calling? You had to answer the phone because it was the primary means people communicated with each other besides letters and postcards when they were not face to face.

The telephone while useful, could also be a thing of terror. Ask your grandmother about "heavy breathers" if you don't believe me because that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Today I saw the following tweet on Twitter:

I prefer to call them lemmings.

I burst out laughing because it called up (get it? Called up?) a long forgotten memory about how the telephone was also a great toy for kids and teenagers to use to annoy anyone with reckless abandon.

Kids used to call stores and ask the clerk who answered "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Yes? Well you better let him out!". How many harried housewives got the call asking if there refrigerator was running only to then be told ,"Well, you'd better catch it!". There was some serious kid joy in hearing the line go dead as the receiver was slammed back down into the cradle.

What's this got to do with lemmings, kimbers, hmmmm?

Well, one night, there was a slumber party for 15 girls at a friend's house. About 7:30, her mother, who had a serious drinking problem (very normal behavior in those days) got fed up with the noise and in her drunken rant called us a bunch of lemmings.

Problem was, none of us knew what a lemming was and we weren't sure she hadn't just made the word up, so Mrs P (sorry, I'll never identify her) got her wish for quiet as the gaggle of girls went into the library to look up lemmings in dictionary. Then we had to get out the Encyclopedia Britannica, to see just how adorable these little things were.

We herded ourselves (like a pack of lemmings) back into the kitchen to tell Mrs. P we thought lemmings were very cute and she slurred back at us "they might be cute but they are stupid... one does something stupid, they all do it! Do you know that if one jumps off a cliff they all do? Stupid I tell ya! Stupid! now you girls keep quiet, I'm going to bed!" and with that she was off.

Now maybe it's adult in me, but no matter how confident I might be in my children to do the right thing, leaving 15 6th graders alone and unsupervised at 8:15 with a whole night looming before them does not seem like the best plan.

Especially when there is a phone in the kitchen, far, far away from the slumbering Mom. After sending a scout to make sure Mrs. P really was asleep we started calling people randomly out of the phonebook and saying:

Hello?

Long distance calling.

Norway.

We're calling from the Lemming Preservation Society and we were wondering if you would like to donate a dollar to buy a brick to build a wall to protect the lemmings from themselves?

and then we cracked up into peals of girlish laughter unable to go any farther. After about an hour of this one guy thanked us for being the best "unwanted call" he had ever received....

What a killjoy! Nothing like adult approval to kill the fun!