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 woke me up one morning before he left for school.

He looked at me very seriously.

“Ovi, wake up. I have something very important to tell you.”

Naturally, I woke up. 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 at work and saw my secretary.

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.