The Carrier: New App Prologue

         It started as a distraction.  Sandy Parker did not, as a rule, answer her cell phone when she was at work.  Her job as General Manager of the local Hacienda Taquito, home of the Buffalo Chicken Finger Lickin’ Taquito Bites, was much too important for her to consider stopping her prep-work for the day for frivolities like that.
It rang first about an hour before the restaurant was scheduled to open.  She paused from cutting tomatoes long enough to acknowledge that her phone was indeed ringing, and let it go to voice mail.
         Then it rang again.  Again she ignored it.  Not two minutes later, it rang a third time.  Frustrated, she pulled her jPhone out of her pocket and checked the ID.  To her surprise, the screen displayed some kind of Chinese ideograms; she snorted aloud and shoved it back into her pocket.  After removing her plastic gloves, pulling back the wisp of hair that had somehow escaped her hairnet, and then donning another pair, she scowled and got back into her work.
         By the twelfth time it began to ring, she was almost done with her made-fresh-daily taquito fixin’s.
         “You just don’t give up, do you!?” she hollered down at the pocket of her slacks, then wiped her hands on her apron and pulled out her jPhone again.  It was the same number, which upset her only in that these people were more stubborn than she.  After taking a second to center herself, she put the phone up to her ear and pushed Talk.
         “Hello?” she said, trying very valiantly, though unsuccessfully, to hide the frustration in her voice.
         “Um.  Oh, hello!  Yes,” came the immediate if surprised reply, from a wavering, somewhat hard-to-understand old man, “Parker Sandra One Six Four Zero Street?  Main, Yes?”  His broken English was, well, broken.
         The old man’s vigor, his immediacy, stunned Sandy for a second.  But only a second.  “I’m Sandy.  How can I help you?”  The last part- the numbers- she ignored; those were the numbers to her father’s house- she hadn’t lived there for almost ten years.
         There was a brief pause before, “Sandy Parker Sandra yes, for the happiness to hearing you!  You favorite Street Main customer, having a gift.”  This was followed by another brief pause.
         When the pause continued longer than Sandy could stand, she interjected, “Wait, what?  Who is this?”
         Again the response was immediate, “What, yes no?  First prime gift.  Having good for you to see it.  You want it?”
         “Want what?  Who are you??” she growled, considering hanging up right then and there.  Her professionalism kept her civil, however.
         “Am gift-giver good for you.  Have you cell phone, yes?”
         “I’m on it- but who is this!?”  Her finger had moved to the red ‘Hang Up’ button on the screen.
         “Ah, yes.  I send to you.”  This was followed almost immediately by the kind of horrific screech that fax machines sometimes do.  Sandy dropped her phone, surprised by the noise.
         She bent down, prepared to shut it off entirely, when she read the screen, ‘Do Not Interrupt Application Transaction or potentially permanent damage will occur.’  Since the noise had not stopped, she went to her desk and put it in a drawer.  It barely helped.  She considered taking it to her car, but glanced up at the clock- her morning employees were due to arrive any moment, and she still had the bank statement stuff to do!  With a frustrated huff, she went to the walk-in cooler and put her phone on the shelf next to the shredded beef bin.

         Happily, the noise was practically nullified by the heavily insulated walls of the walk-in; except when the door was open, she could ignore it safely.  Right on cue, James ‘Jimmy’ Flanderson, her morning cook, knocked on the door.  Her daily routine could continue without further interruption.
         Except when the door was opened.  Jimmy had to ask, so she had to respond.  She told him it was an App that she was testing, designed to keep lettuce cool with sonic vibrations.  He bought it without question, which made her smile to keep from laughing.  This continued until sometime after 3 o’clock, when she walked into the back room to find Jimmy tossing lettuce into the trash.

         “Jimmy, what are you doing?” she asked.
         He jumped a little.  “I thought… you said the sonic thingy… you know, kept the salad cold, right?”
         She winced at her attempt-at-humor gone bad, “What about it?”
         He stuck his hand into the lettuce bin again, “It stopped making that noise, so I thought that meant the salad was bad or somethin’.”
         She groaned at the loss of money she was just the cause of.  “Jesus, Jim!  I was just messing with you!  Don’t toss the sala-” she paused to correct herself, “-this lettuce is still good.”
         Jimmy looked relieved, “Oh, okay.  Good.  I thought it still felt pretty cold anyway.”
         She pushed past him into the walk-in to find her jPhone blinking at her.  As the door closed behind her, she picked her cell up and examined it.  There were something like twelve rectangles arranged in a circle, slightly overlapping each other wherever they could. 
         This was not the annoying part.
         She got the kind of annoying unpleasantness in her gut she always got when her stress level rose.  All she wanted to do was exit out of the App (which she didn’t want anyway) so she could delete it, but there was no clear ‘Exit’ button.
         This was not the annoying part, either.
         The annoying part was that underlayed beneath the overlapping rectangles were the national flags of eleven countries, also arranged in a circle.  This meant that only one of the flags perfectly matched the rectangle it belonged to- China.  She figured these flags represented languages, so she scanned the screen to find the flag of Great Britain, because there was no U.S. flag present.  And she pushed it.

         But instead of British English, the screen went stark white, lit up with ‘WILLKOMMEN ZU’ in bold black letters.  Directly beneath this was, in flaring red, ‘DRACHEBALLONBAUCH’.
         “Dray-chee…dray-chee-ball-on-bowch?” she asked the screen, sounding out the enormous, cumbersome word before her.  She found that if she turned her jPhone this way and that, the word seemed to shimmer an orange-ish color.  At the bottom of the screen was a small green button marked, ‘Anfaug?’

         “Will come in zoo, dray chee ball on bowch.  What the hell?”  She figured it must be Russian or Norwegian or something.  Something about this whole thing seemed familiar, like a really old, bad dream being revisited.  However, her curiosity got the best of her- she pushed the green button.
         What she saw made her drop her jPhone, which clattered to the floor.

         Staring up at her from the screen of her cell was a three-dimensional likeness of a chubby, perhaps even genuinely overweight cartoon dragon, it’s chubby-cheeked face lit up in a smile and it’s long tail coiled up in a serpentine pattern beneath it’s large round belly.  It’s foreclaws rested gingerly on top of it’s oversized middle, and the whole dragon seemed to wave and bob gently, as if suspended in mid-air.

         “You can’t be serious…” she was finally able to say, breath plainly visible in the crisp air of the walk-in.