If The Phone Doesn’t Ring, Don’t Pick It Up
An Owl Spit Story
By Ovi Catanescu
When I was in high school, my older brother Adi had classes in the morning and I had classes in the afternoon.
One day, in the morning, he came into my room and woke me up saying:
“Ovi, wake up. I want to tell you something.”
Naturally, I woke up and a little worried. If your older brother tells you he has something very important to say, you listen.
Then he gave me his important advice:
“If the phone doesn’t ring, don’t pick it up.”
And with that, he ran off to school.
That was it.
No explanation. No great lesson. Just Adi leaving me there with one of the most useless pieces of advice anyone had ever given me.
And somehow, I never forgot it.
Years later, I was leaving the office and in may way out of the company I had pass the secretary office, where our secretary was still very busy with her work.
I stopped and said very seriously:
“Hey, if the phone doesn’t ring, don’t pick it up.”
Then I walked away smiling. Just like my brother had done to me years before.
Some family wisdom is profound.
Some changes your life.
And some simply survives long enough to be passed on to the next unsuspecting person.
Where’s the Owl Spit?
Maybe it’s in the little things we repeat without even realizing why — a ridiculous sentence, an old joke, a brother’s voice from decades ago.
The things that make absolutely no sense to anyone else…
but somehow become part of us.
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