No, I said. I don’t care about call display, call forwarding, three-way calling, detailed billing, or video games. I do not want to hear the theme from Titanic when someone calls me. I do not want an extended warranty. And I do not want a phone that vibrates. I turn my phone off when I go into a theater. I am not the guy who accompanies the President, who carries the briefcase with the codes. No one cares whether they can reach me immediately. I just want a phone that I can take with me. That’s all.

But would it have killed the salesman to point out other possible scenarios where a vibrating phone might be an advantage? “What if, one night, you’re hiding in a house under construction, eavesdropping on three guys as they discuss their murder plans and their wishes to kill you the next time they run into you, and your phone starts ringing, revealing to them your hiding spot? Wouldn’t you want a vibrating phone then?”

And of course, I would have said yes.

It would have been very nice, at that moment, to have a phone that jiggled instead of ringing. But since I didn’t, Don Greenway, Roger Carpington, and the psychopath I knew only as Rick were all looking in my direction.

“D’ya hear that?” Rick said.

“Sounds like a phone,” Carpington said.

“No shit?” said Rick. “You think?”

By now it had rung three times. I was holding my breath, waiting for a fourth ring, but it never came. At the first ring, my mind was scrambling. My first impulse was to try to smother the gadget with my hands. If you could have seen me in the dark, you’d have thought I’d been shot in the chest, the way I was clutching it. I wanted to turn it off, but that would have meant taking it out of my jacket, at which point the ring would have become even louder. You had to press a button on the top and hold it hard for three seconds to shut it down, and it wouldn’t take much more time than that for these three men to reach the building.

And then I had another idea. I slipped the phone out of my jacket and left it in plain view on the plywood floor, and scurried backward, crablike, into the darker recesses of the house. There was a stack of four-by-eight sheets of drywall, about two feet high, back around where the kitchen was going to be, and I slithered in behind it as the three men walked across the dirt toward the house. Now I could only hear what they had to say, not see them.

“It was right around here,” Greenway said.

“Yeah, over this way,” Rick said.

I heard feet stepping up into the house, then Carpington’s voice. “Look, right here.”