Of Cold Calls and Cold Cuts…
I’m an amiable sort of person. I strike up conversations with those at the till when I’m getting groceries, have long gabs with my local purveyor of teas, and enjoy a playful relationship with the nice lady at the cheese shop wherein she will bully me into spending absurd amounts on Le Maréchal or Comté Symphonie. I enjoy talking to people, and my trusting nature makes me a believer of the mantra that there’s always something to learn if you would but listen. It’s a simple pleasure, keeps me rooted in the world, and discourages misanthropy.
Enter the phone, that tiny rectangle of evils. I get a lot of spam calls, to the point where I don’t like answering if I don’t recognize the number. This goes against my friendly nature, and I route a lot of work stuff to my personal cell because I’m a workaholic who enjoys being reachable. On top of all of this, there’s a growing trend among higher ups to have delisted numbers, effectively cancelling out any assistance by showing up as UNKNOWN rather than, say, their company or name. It’s truly a gamble every time I answer.
I’m old enough to remember having a single landline in the house, with my sisters constantly fighting to control the line while the odd call would come for my parents or an uncle would want to ask me what I wanted for my birthday or Christmas. I enjoyed answering the phone and feeling important. The caller would ask for so and so and I would pass it along – simple enough, and I discharged my duty well. Probably passed several telemarketers to my parents, because that’s who they asked for, and who am I to screen calls? The real breakthrough came with the invention of Caller ID.
The best part of these old phones was that it was always missing and low on battery.
When that first appeared, it would show a name only if you had personally saved it into the phone’s memory, otherwise it would only display the number that was calling you. I’m not good with numbers. Not in the math sense – I can SOH CAH TOA creditably – but in the remembering of numbers. If you tell me to remember 58, I’ll probably say it was 85. Or was it 74? I know it had a 2 in it… Phone numbers, obviously, were a mysterious jumble to me. All I knew for sure was area codes: 403 for Red Deer and southern Alberta, 780 for anyone north of us.
So, when my eldest sister moved north for a number of years, I always assumed a 780 number was her calling. This assumption worked well for me until one particular dinner. We were having giant sandwiches and soup – a classic dad meal that was a favourite of mine – when a 780 number should happen to call. Being the closest to the phone I grabbed it up, saw the number, and told everyone it was sister. Answering, I was met with a funny female voice. Oh ho! says I, she’s having a giggle, pretending to be someone else and asking to speak to “the parent at home.” Stop pretending, I tell her, then jump into a lengthy description of our sandwiches. You see, I had been fighting my dad earlier that day in the grocery store, insisting that he had surely never used mustard before (ah, youth, how foolish you are!), and that we needn’t buy it. It was about the 5 minute mark, with the poor woman trying to get a word in while I described our meal and was just getting to the soup – a fine minestrone, if you please – that the line suddenly clicked dead.
“She hung up,” I told my family confusedly.
My dad took the phone and checked the number. “That wasn’t your sister,” says he.
Apparently, I had conducted a long conversation about sandwiches and soup with a telemarketer. The result? We didn’t have a single spam call for roughly 3 or 4 years. Probably got a note put on their call lists that this number belongs to a crazy person with a penchant for meat and bread and not letting you talk to the adults.
Technology has advanced rapidly since then. Not only do we have several fine varieties of mustard, and access to imported meats and cheeses (see above for my cheese bully), but we now have crazy things for spam calls that I don’t really understand. Apparently, they can hijack a local number and route a call through it, making it appear local. They also don’t even have someone on the other end anymore, preferring a robot telling me that Amazon has misplaced a package or the CRA is going to sue me for unpaid taxes. The strangest of all is the silent line that clicks once and then hangs up. I suspect this is how they do the local number trap and apologize if anyone is getting spam calls from my number.
I feel like, if I could get a good old fashioned person on the line trying to get my credit card information, I could regale them with tales of Croque Monsieurs and Reubens and get back onto the Crazy Person list. Bring back that personal touch, Scammers, if you’d be so kind. But until then, if you’re calling me for anything important, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
