Hard to Reach
The phone rings and you look at the number. These aren’t the good old days of rotary phones and answering machines, the days when you had to wait for the incoming call to ring through and the voice to begin before you knew who was calling. No, this is now, and you instantly see a name paired with a number, a sure way to quickly identify who’s after you, unless of course your contacts are corrupted and have been since you left the agency which took care of your technology for as long as you can remember. Now, only sometimes is the caller identified, while other times your best friend might be calling but all you see is a number.
“Do I answer it?” You ask yourself, looking hard at the number, trying your darnedest to remember if this is in fact your college roommate of three years. You long for the days when phone numbers were easy to remember, the days when your brain still remembered things like phone numbers and first names.
“Maybe it’s Dan,” you say to yourself.
Since you’re not quite sure, you chose to ignore the call and keep an eye on voice-mail. If it’s someone you know, they will leave a message. Remember when people used to leave messages, actual voice messages and not texts that read, “just tried calling you.”
Remember those long rambling messages from your mom who called to find out if you planned to come home for the holidays, but mostly wondered why you don’t call more often. She didn’t lay a huge guilt trip on you, but you could tell from the tone of her voice. If she were still with us, her text would just read, “?”
These days, especially when you’re waiting for a call back from a doctor’s office or contractor, you tend to let your guard down and pick-up calls you wouldn’t otherwise. Most of the time, an incoming call will say spam risk, but not always, which makes this game tricky. You’re waiting for that important call back from the dog sitter you need to meet before your week long trip to New York City. The phone rings, people are busy, you don’t want to miss them, so against your better judgment, and even though you don’t recognize the number, you answer it.
“Hello?” At least by now you’ve learned not to say much until you find out who’s on the other end. You’ve learned about risks associated with identity theft, so you purposely limit what you say right out of the gate. You’d grunt, but that’s a bridge too far. You used to be nice, and say, “Hello this is Steve.” But don’t anymore, afraid the dark web will steal the sound of your voice. So now, you just say, “hello”, and wait for them to say something, which they don’t, because there’s nobody there. Instead, you instantly know it’s a robocall and someone’s not going to ring on until you’ve picked up and started talking, which you have. Sometimes, when I sense the pause, I just hang up. And a few times, your best friend from college will call back to say, “why did you hang up on me before I even said a word?”
Other times, your instincts are exactly right. No, it’s not your college roommate calling to find out if you want to go see the Allman Brothers this summer. In those times when you don’t instantly hang-up, you wait long enough to be greeted by someone selling you something. “Hi, this is Derek from…” Before poor Derek can even get the name of his solar panel company out of his mouth, you answer with, “Sorry, wrong number.”
Of course it’s not a wrong number, they know who they are calling, but those two words give you license to walk away with absolutely no guilt. Derek will make a plea for you to stay on long enough to hear his pitch, but you’re gone. Click! You don’t have time for the pitch, and you will decide when you’re going to install solar panels on your hundred year old victorian which has too many gables to make it an easy phone call anyway.
Hanging up on perfect strangers used to hurt a bit, but no longer. You don’t exactly know when you turned cold, and don’t care. Soon, you sense it’s not even going to be a real person, but instead an artificial intelligence bot programed to sound like your college roommate. Then what?
“Hey Steve,” the bot will say when you pick up the phone. “It’s Dan. Do you want to go see Taylor Swift with me this summer?”
“You’re not Dan,” you’re going to say, knowing Dan wouldn’t call to ask about Taylor Swift. Dan the bot quickly changes the subject to the real reason for the call.
“Hey, did I tell you about the solar panels I just thad installed on my roof?”
To which you respond, “wrong number.”
There, you feel better even though you just hung up on an AI of your college roommate, who’s in love with Taylor Swift, and trying to sell you the future. You need to install solar panels, but damn if it’s going to be through a call from a bot, no matter who they pretend to be.
When your contacts have been corrupted since the day you retired and left the digital sanctuary of the agency you’d been with since rotary phones still existed, you feel like you’re getting a lot of unidentified calls. Whey your friends tell you that you’re hard to reach, you say no your not, and suggest they send you a letter, and promise to write back.
