"Is Jose there?" he asked, and I held the phone in my hand and pondered my dilemma.

Do I tell the caller about that night in August, when twilight arrived along with a black SUV?  When two very large gentlemen got out and knocked on the door, asking for Jose?  Do I tell him about the whispered conversation in the hallway, and the way Jose said, "I'll be back in a little bit" when his eyes told me something else?  Or how about when one of the strangers turned to me as he was leaving and muttered, "This never happened" and the dog started whimpering?

Do I mention the cryptic phone message three days later, unintelligible except for four very deliberate words: "We want the commodities"?  Do I describe the sleepless nights, the paranoia, the fear that somehow I'd gotten involved in something I'd ultimately regret?

Nah.  I just told him the truth.  "Sorry, you've got the wrong number," and he apologized and I hung up, and then wondered about what I'd just said.

I didn't really hang up.  I pushed the "off" button.  I want to be up front here.

When was the last time I'd said, "Sorry, wrong number"?  When was the last time, actually, that I'd answered the phone without knowing who was calling, or at least having a pretty good idea? 

I've worked at home for 18 years, which roughly corresponds to the introduction of Caller ID, and I was an immediate user.  No more time would be wasted sitting through spiels about satellite dishes or time-shares, listening to pleas or pledges or the occasional person asking me to please pay my water bill.  I have an answering machine and I know how to use it.

Now Caller ID is a standard feature, although it still catches people by surprise.  The other day, my wife answered the phone and then handed it to me.  "It's the doctor's office," she said, which apparently surprised the nice lady on the other end, because when I got on the line she said, "Oh, you must have one of those fancy phones."  Uh, yes.  I also have one of those fancy boxes in my living room that shows actual moving pictures with sound.  Puh-leese. 

I only answered this Jose-seeking call because it was my cell phone, which nobody calls because it's usually somewhere I'm not, and I assumed it was a family member.  Also, I was just feeling reckless that day.

Now I think about it, when was the last time I called a wrong number?  When was the last time you did?  This is the 21st century; we no longer need to rely on memory or mnemonics or scraps of paper shoved in a pocket.  When we save a number for future reference, we just store it in our cell or our PDA or our PC and try not to think about battery life.  Long gone are the days when I carried around a dozen frequently called numbers in my head; I'm not sure I remember how.

And when are we going to get a modern replacement for "dialing" when it comes to phones?  Nobody dials; we haven't in over 20 years, not most of us.  But "punch" or "push" don't sound right.  Maybe it'll be the ubiquitous "enter," although personally I'm holding out for some techno-neologism, like "phased" or "celled":

"Dude, I celled your number but I got some guy named Jose!  Are you in trouble?"

And while we're putting words in storage, how about "water cooler"?  Do offices still have water coolers, and do people still talk around them?  Isn't it time we upgraded the vernacular?  I have a feeling what we used to call water cooler conversations now take place via e-mail, or else involve coffee.  Maybe "coffee talk" needs to make a comeback.

I'm not mourning here.  There is a natural order to language, and English in particular rarely stays in one place.  I suspect, for example, that "gate" has run its course as a suffix for political scandal, and "grassy knoll" might not be as useful as shorthand for conspiracy theories.  I imagine "surfing" to describe wandering the Internet will be replaced with something else soon, and using "tape" as a verb will revert to the sticky variety only.

Still, "cool" has described an aesthetic for nearly a century and I hear it (and use it) all the time.  "Movie" is really a silly word but I see no sign it's going anywhere soon, either.  And despite all the predictions 30 years ago about the metric conversion of America, our waistlines still expand by inches and we drive for miles, and if someone has to run out late at night, at least in my house, it's going to be to retrieve a gallon of milk.

Maybe that’s where Jose went, come to think of it, but I can't help being a little suspicious.  Then again, some days I see grassy knolls everywhere.