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A Brief History: The original version of this story, “When Pagers Go Crazy,” was written as a therapy session for me during a time when the job I had required me to carry a pager, even when I worked alone on the third shift, and even when I took my 2 am lunch break. And not only would the various nursing stations or the emergency room page me when I was on break (my job was to issue various patient care equipment to the hospital’s various departments on request), or even when I was doing other work, they’d do it as their STAT orders came through the printer (that I would be sitting next to and clearly competent to check in real time) and the overhead page (contact of last resort) went off. It was a case of overzealousness for equipment that was rarely used to save a life (unlike crash carts, which I was not responsible for) and was often left at the nursing station, untouched, for a good three hours after I busted my butt getting it to them. So, that pager often made me crazy, and this story, originally, was written to reconcile my hatred for it with the reality of how unnecessary it often became.
In the original version, Ward (now Avery) was a full-blown psychologist, and I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if a man employed to treat crazy was crazy himself, which explained why he kept following this girl around the grocery store. But a real-life counselor friend of mine told me that psychologists are prescreened for things like that, and that the idea would never actually work. So I changed Ward’s name and made him a college student who’s studying psychology instead. The shift to cellphones was a reflection of the times, as pagers had gone out of style when I went back to revise this in 2006 for Seven-Sided Dice: The Collection of Junk Volume 3. I kept the rest of the story intact because it’s still therapy—I get annoyed when people keep checking their phones when I’m trying to enjoy their company.
Other than that, the story I’m presenting now is basically the same as what I had revised in 2006, with the key difference being the addition of the fraternity house sequence. I added the fraternity house to this version for greater emotional context and better structural integrity. The final scene before the ending, when Avery goes to Dexter’s house and gets his tires shot out, is also new. I wanted the final cellphone reference to be something positive. So, that’s my basic note on “When Cellphones Go Crazy.”