Recently I’ve felt compelled to write about this evening several months ago. It was the end of a fairly disastrous evening, which found me and a friend waiting for a green line train that was simply not coming, watching a small group of girls who were also apparently coming from a party, or a bar, babysitting their very drunk friend. “The train isn’t coming,” I said. We were considering getting a cab, and had started walking back towards Boston, when I got a phone call.

It was from my friend Chris, which is somewhat unusual: we seldom have any reason to call each other now that we’re on opposite ends of the country. I answered and asked what was going on. It took a while to figure this out: he was calling on behalf of Seth, who was locked out of the house I wasn’t at, and who doesn’t have a phone. He’d connected to our wireless and sat in the backyard.

The exchange that followed was nothing short of awkward, and the fact that this conversation was even happening was useless to an unimaginable degree. “I’m in Allston,” I had to explain. “Look, can you find out when the last inbound train leaves? Just ask Seth, he’ll understand.” We’d barely missed the last one, it turns out. “I don’t know what to say. We’re sort of stranded. I guess if he’s willing to pay for a cab?”

All of this, of course, was filtered through an operator who didn’t quite understand what was going on, so nobody really knew. Eventually we took a cab back home, paying twenty or thirty dollars worth of carfare for an evening that was ultimately wasted. Somehow it seemed to all work out to a net change of nothing at all. Gain nothing, lose nothing.

This, by the way, is why people should have cell phones. They are helpful.