'Whoever you are,' Sam said formidably, 'it ain't going to be lucky for you if you ever need telephone service and you've kept wasting my time. The line's dead in two places, else I couldn't talk to you. The voice said, 'Sam, it's the second of July where you are, and you're up a pole by Bridge's Run. He knew it just about as well as he knew his own, and it was irritating not to be able to call this joker by name. If it talked a little more, he undoubtedly would. The voice was familiar, though he couldn't quite place it. 'I'm not hanging up,' said Sam dourly, 'but you'd better!' Naturally, he thought somebody was trying to joke with him, and when a man is working is no time for jokes. He was up a telephone pole, trying to do some work, resting in his safety belt and with his climbing irons safely fixed in the wood. Don't you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the twelfth of July. 'This is you,' the voice on the wire repeated. Startled, he put the receiver to his ear. He'd hooked in his lineman's phone and he couldn't raise Central, so he was just going to start looking for the break when his phone rang back, though the line had checked dead. He was hunting for the place where that party line had gone dead.

It began about six o'clock on July second, when Sam was up a telephone pole near Bridge's Run. And, of course, anybody who'd taken that seriously and had been puttering around on a device to make private conversations on a party line telephone possible, and almost had the trick. Anybody, say, who was a telephone lineman for the Batesville and Rappahannock Telephone Company, and who happened to be engaged to Rosie, and who had been told admiringly by Rosie that a man as smart as he was ought to make something wonderful of himself.

It could have happened to anybody well, almost anybody. But it's all perfectly respectable and straightforward. He does not want the question of privacy to be raised again especially in Rosie's hearing. You are not supposed to believe this story, and if you ask Sam Yoder about it, he is apt to say that it's all a lie.

Sam, This is You by Murray Leinster