I hate telephones.

For one thing, they have a habit of waking you up at the most inconvenient times. It was still dark outside when the one on my nightstand went off like a bomb. I groaned and tried to turn off the alarm clock. Since it wasn't ringing, it laughed at me. The horrible racket from the phone kept right on.

"What time is it, anyhow?" I mumbled. My mouth tasted like something you'd spread on nasturtiums.

"It's 5:07," the clock said, still giggling. The horological demon in there was supposed to be friendly, not sappy. I'd thought more than once about getting the controlling cantrip fixed, but twenty-five crowns is twenty-five crowns. On a government salary, you learn to put up with things. I picked up the receiver. That was the cue for the noise elemental in the base of the phone to shut up, which it did - Ma Bell's magic, unlike that from a cheap dock company, does exactly what it's supposed to do, no more, no less.

"Fisher here," I said, hoping I didn't sound as far underwater as I felt "Hello, David. This is Kelly, back in D.StcC."

You could have fooled me. After the imp in one phone's mouthpiece relays words through the ether to the one in another phone's earpiece and the second imp passes them on to you, they hardly sound as if they came from a real person, let alone from anyone in particular. That's the other reason I hate phones.

But the cursed things have sprouted like toadstools the past ten years, ever since ectoplasmic doning let the phone company crank out legions of near-identical speaker imps, and since switching spells got sophisticated enough so you could reliably select the imp you wanted from among those legions.

They say they're going to have an answer to the voice problem real soon. They've been saying that since the day after phones were invented. I'll believe it when I hear it. Some things are even bigger than Ma Bell.