As soon as you've hung up, you know that you made a mistake, but now there is no way to rectify it...
Your phone starts ringing, ringing, ringing. As you reach out the pick it up, shakily, it starts to vibrate, rattling and buzzing, causing you to retract your hand with a hollow little gasp, mumbling to yourself that it must just be a technical malfunction. You know it is not a technical malfunction. There is nothing wrong with the phone.
(How did you get to this point? Everything seems a blur.)
Too unsettled to answer, you let the phone go to machine. It seems to take forever, the phone rattling hard, buzzing as if it were host to a hive of wasps, hornets, something insectoid, alien. That ring... ring... ring . . . ring . . . ring . . . r - i - n - g . . . r - - - i - - - - - n - - - g g g g . . .
"I'm not available to take your call. If you're a solicitor, I am uninterested in your petty contrivances. Important messages only!"
You never noticed that your voice was so abrasive before. The whole message seems so incredibly rude, and you just know they're somehow taking even greater offense from having to hear it. Why couldn't you have been born with a sunnier disposition? Why didn't you just let this all slide?