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The Hint Line

The Hint Line

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 The phone rang at around three in the afternoon. I stared at it for a long time–the beige rotary antiquity sitting far back on my desk next to a scrambled Rubik’s cube and a book of chess puzzles. I had almost forgotten the thing even existed, despite the fact that it had directed the flow of my entire life for the last three decades. Its ring was loud and tactile–like those old alarm clocks with a hammer that physically pounds back and forth against two bells. The sound gave me goosebumps. I guess for you to understand why something as innocuous as a ringing phone could cause me such trepidation, I had better start from the beginning. When I was in high school, I was a gaming fanatic who was blessed with wealthy parents and a generous allowance. I owned every home console available in North America, as well as a couple that weren’t, and every penny that didn’t go towards expanding my game collection got converted to quarters at the arcade on a regular basis. An obsession with video games was certainly not an uncommon condition among boys my age–I merely took it to a level that few others could even dream of. I started my freshman year at university in ‘92. My parents kept paying me the same allowance and covered the tuition, but everything else was up to me. It became apparent early on that maintaining my former gaming budget while also paying for the dorm, food, and other living expenses was, to put it mildly, financially untenable. For the first time in my life, the horrifying prospect of needing additional income had dawned on me. Wandering around campus during the day was something I tended to avoid–too many people were out and about; it made me anxious. As such, it wasn’t until well after dark one Friday night that I hit the campus job boards in the hopes of finding something that could ease the burden on my wallet while minimizing the burden on me. I was not an ambitious kid–I wanted to earn just enough cash to keep a roof over my head and feed my stomach and gaming addiction while doing as little work as possible in the process. My prospects were grim. The postings on the board were all volunteer positions or part-time retail gigs. The retail jobs would have paid enough, and bagging groceries probably wouldn’t have been too mentally taxing, but the thought of wearing a fake smile and dealing face-to-face with an unending stream of people every day made me dry heave. There was one posting for a data entry job, but all the dangling tabs with the phone number to call had already been torn off. Data entry sounded like it could be up my alley, so I decided to visit the smaller job board outside the computer lab in the hopes of finding more. To my dismay, the cork board hanging in the dimly-lit hall outside the computer lab displayed a smaller selection of the same jobs I had already seen. I was about to head back to the dorms to lament over my poor luck, when something white jutting out from behind the board caught my eye–the slightest hint of a sheet of paper someone had slipped between the wall and the cork board. My first ham-fisted attempts at fishing it out with my fingernail failed miserably. I pulled out my student ID card and pressed the edge of it against the sliver of paper, then dragged it along the wall. The sheet of paper slid right into my hand. Grinning at my cleverness, I looked the paper over. There were two lines typed out in all caps at its center: DO YOU LIKE VIDEO GAMES?CALL FOR MORE INFO There was a phone number printed at the bottom of the sheet. My heart rate amped up a notch. Could this be the Holy Grail that it appeared to be? I would have given my left arm for a paying job that involved video games, and that seemed to be what I had stumbled upon. I felt absurdly protective of that little piece of paper. In my mind it was a divine treasure, hidden there for me to find. I glanced down the hallway in both directions. There was a couple down at one end who were plainly too interested in each other to pay me any notice, and I thought I saw a man standing in the shadows at the other end of the hall–but when I blinked and squinted to get a better look there was nothing there. Probably my sudden paranoia playing tricks on me. I looked back at the job posting in my hands, folded it into my pocket, then practically sprinted all the way back to the dorms. Expecting it to go to a machine so late at night, my fear over even the slightest possibility that I may miss out if I waited too long drove me to call the number that night. To my surprise, a woman answered. “Hello?” said the woman. She sounded alert, not like someone who had been awaken by a phone call in the middle of the night. That was promising. “Hi, I hope it’s not too late. I’m calling about the, uh, video game job?” I said. There was a pregnant pause, and for a moment I feared that I had lost the connection, or the woman had hung up. Maybe the message I had found was a joke, and I had ...
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