I was minding my own business yesterday (well, not really, I never do - does anyone, and if so, what's the matter with that person?) when my cell phone rang.

``You're alive!'' the voice on the other end announced. ``I was worried.''

As someone torn by doubt over virtually every step I take - Am I wearing the right thing? Did I say the wrong thing? Should I have ordered the pasta instead of the fish? - the one thing I don't usually stress about is my existence. I know I'm here; otherwise, I wouldn't be so nervous all the time.

So why did my friend think I'd perished? Perhaps I'd become one of those victims of a premature obit you sometimes hear about, where everyone shares a good laugh when the ``deceased'' shows up at work.

No, the tip-off was something even more reliable than a newspaper headline and a direction about where to send flowers. My friend had called my home phone in the year 2003, and gotten a busy signal.

A busy signal. BLAAT BLAAT BLAAT BLAAT BLAAT.

``I was going to call 911,'' she said. ``I thought something must be wrong.''

After she reached me on my cell phone, however, and learned I was still among the living, and the phoning, her heartfelt concern turned immediately to annoyance.

``How can you not have call-waiting?'' she demanded.

(We do, of course, but my home phone was broken.)

So that's what the world is coming to. A person can be busy - must be busy, in fact - but a telephone can't be. It would be antisocial.

So intolerant are we of busy signals, in fact, that the phone company offers a service in which, should the unspeakable happen and you encounter the dreaded signal, rather than having to go through the effort of calling back - and possibly facing another potentially scarring busy signal - you simply can agree to pay a small fee and be called when the line is free.

Phew!

Like many of us, I've gotten a busy signal when trying to reach some Luddite or another. But I myself haven't emitted a busy signal since call-waiting was introduced, so this was my first taste of what life's like on the other side. Wow, there's a lot of hostility out there.

My impression was confirmed in an interview with one of the few holdouts I know. ``People try to pressure me all the time,'' she told me (in person - trying to get her on the phone is impossible, and I told her as much).

I sounded annoyed, but I wasn't. I actually liked hearing the busy signal. It made me nostalgic for the old world and, truthfully, a little worried about the future.

Slightly more than 42 percent of Verizon's residential customers have call-waiting, and that number is sure to rise. Even though a very nice spokesman assured me there probably never would come a day without busy signals - and if it did come, it would be in the distant future - I already can see a time when if you want to hear a busy signal, you'll have to go to a museum or wait for it to be featured on that NPR show, ``Lost & Found Sound.''

``Coming up, we'll hear laundry being cleaned on rocks, the whistle from a steam-engine train and a busy signal.''