Egg Timer

He asked me to go with him to a hardware store on Court Street 
so that he could get an egg timer for the telephone just installed. 

An egg timer? 

Yeah, this is a kind of hourglass with sand that runs for three 
minutes and that’s the way I like my egg and when I use the telephone 
I know when the three minutes is up because that’s how they charge 
you at the phone company, the bastards. I'll have the egg timer on 
my desk and I'll hang up at the last grain of sand. Frank McCourt