Answering the Phone Like It’s 1999 (and Why I Still Do)

In an age of spam calls, scam alerts, and algorithmic matchmaking gone rogue, answering the phone has become a lost art—or a risky gamble. But for those of you who still pick up, there's legacy, curiosity, and a dash of storytelling gold waiting on the other end. This post explores why Jean still answers unknown calls, what happened when a mysterious woman asked for her late husband, and how a $7.98 cell plan became part of her personal history.  AI... 

I’m not one of those old people who is afraid to answer a phone call from an unknown number. Yes, I’ve been to the classes on how not to be a senior citizen who gets scammed by a fake grandson who needs bail money to get out of a Mexican jail. I know enough not to buy gift cards, money orders or bitcoins for strangers who will “pay me for the trouble” by letting me keep part of the money from their (bad) check. I know better than to believe Microsoft would call little old me to tell me my computer has a virus and I need to let the caller remotely control my keyboard. In the world of protecting old people from themselves we are told if it’s a legitimate call, they will leave a voice mail. But what fun would that be? Besides, I tell people who question why I would put myself in harm’s way by answering that very scary phone that I know how to hang up, and I would sooner tell someone on the phone my weight than give out my Social Security number, bank routing info or credit card details. And I don’t make donations by phone. “So save your pitch for someone else,” I’ve been known to say. 

The Mysterious Caller 

I was expecting a call back from my financial advisor when I answered the phone and heard a woman asking to speak to Don. My husband died over a decade ago so I replied, “May I say who is calling?” to which the woman hemmed and hawed and finally repeated, “Can I speak to Don?” Her voice wasn’t crackly sounding like most people in my age bracket or I would have thought it was an old girlfriend trying to get closure—or maybe start something up again. 

But her voice was young and sexy and for a split second I thought about all those young women with cleavage-forward photos that I just deleted from my Facebook Page’s “People You May Know” slideshow. God only knows what I was researching online to give Facebook’s matchmaking algorithm the idea I’d be interested in finding overseas women with names like Cherry whose sweaters are two sizes too small. Clearly the algorithm went rogue. Unfortunately, I knew a man who did click one of those dark-eyed girls to find romance but all he got was an imaginary girlfriend who ghosted him when his bank account was drained.

Then my mind went to the possibility there could be a daughter out there that Don never knew about who is trying to fill in her long lost family tree. We didn’t talk much about our past romantic histories but he was a good looking guy who no doubt sowed a few wild oats, as the saying goes. But I reasoned he would have been found years ago by an unknown child because we didn’t move around much. Nope, I finally decided it was a telemarketer so I told the woman, “You might want to take this number off your call list. Don’s been dead for quite some time.” She hung up. 

When I got off the phone I googled her phone number, as I always do, to see if it came from a known scammer but this time the number the woman was calling from was a local mortgage company. The last time Don’s name was on a mortgage it was near the turn of century and it was paid off long ago. Curiosity can lead us down some strange paths and I can’t stop running scenarios through my head. Should I call the number back and demand to talk to the women who failed to announce she was calling from a mortgage company? Do mortgage companies do cold canvassing? Was there something wrong with that last mortgage or does Don still own one of the rental properties he had back in his prime because a mortgage company screwed up? Her reasons for calling could be anything, and if she sends a follow up in the mail, I will be ready with my Tenacity Hat on and a notepad close at hand. 

Don’s Legacy and a $7.98 Cell Plan

Don had his massive stroke in 2001 leaving him unable to use a phone, but the phone number he used—and I still do use—went back the 1980s when cell service was first introduced to our city. He had rental property, a parking lot maintenance business and a personal life attached to that phone and we didn’t want to give up the number because we still needed many of those people to be able to contact us. The cell company, however, looking for a way out of the contract didn't want to accept my checks for the monthly payments, and they made me jump through hoops to get the contract changed over to my name. 

One of the hoops involved getting a letter from a doctor stating that Don could no longer write or talk and another letter from a contract lawyer basically stating the obvious, that he was not dead yet and while we didn’t have the same last name we were legally married and had the documents to prove it. Because Don was one of the first to sign up for those crazy things called a CELL phone—the contract had a lifetime fixed rate of $7.98 a month. That didn’t change until I wanted a smart phone a few short years ago. If I had wanted to keep a flip phone I could still be paying $7.98. 

Forty plus years of cell service for $7.98 a month was hard to give up but it was worth it because I do like having a semi-smart phone. It’s an android, the stepchild of the coveted Apple iPhone, which is smart enough to challenge me but not outsmart me. My fellow residents are always talking about how long they have to stand in line down at the Apple Store to get one thing or another fixed or figured out. 

When I left the flip phone behind I got to keep our Vintage Phone Number. Or I should I once again had to put on my Tenacity Hat and jump through enough hoops to rival those in an old fashioned circus act involving a pack of poodles to make that happen. So in case, you’re wondering I will keep on answering unknown calls for as long as I remember how to hang up, because I’ve got nothing to lose—except the time I’ve saved by not standing in line at the Apple Store, and because sometimes the best stories start with a ring and a little curiosity. ©

 Until Next Wednesday. 

How Doing Stupid Things is Part of a Vast right Wing Conspiracy

“Stupid is what stupid does.” is an idiom popularized by the movie, Forest Gump and according to the Urban Dictionary it means, “an intelligent person who does stupid things is still stupid. You are what you do.” Go ahead, call me stupid. It won’t be the first time that label has been pinned on me. The first time that I remember hearing it was when I was trying to learn to tie my shoes. My mother tried to teach me. My dad tried to teach me. My brother tried to teach me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mailman, milkman and the baker down the street tried to teach me. It wasn’t until some where a long the line another left-handed person got in the act and got the job done and now, at nearly eighty, I still show off my shoe tying skills by double knotting my laces.

The last time someone called me stupid was this morning when I berated myself for forgetting the Cardinal Rules for fixing all computer related boo-boos: 1) When all else failed restart your machine. 2) Restart your wi-fi. 3) Go to your bedroom, lay down a few minutes then get back up and restart your whole freaking day if you have to and by some miracle it all helps. But why does it take me a hour or two of frustration trying to get my printer to work before---Lo and Behold---the Cardinal Rules pop into my head? Someone needs to embroider those rules on throw pillow. I’ll bet they’d make a lot of money and I would be first in line to buy one.

I’ve been packing boxes and I’m up to 76 now. I have a handwritten inventory sheet that I finally typed into a word document and I wanted to print it off. Thus I was given the keys to Frustration City. Losing my printer was a frequent occurrence with my old computer and I got so I could download new drivers and get it back online in less than ten minutes. But with my new computer everything I tried including getting new drivers wasn’t working. Until I remembered to apply the freaking magic rules. 

After I move I wouldn’t even need a printer if I didn’t want one. They’ll have a IT room like in hotels where you can walk in with your laptop and send your documents to one of their printers.They’ll also have an IT guy at our beck-and-call too which I was excited about until I learned he gave us bad information when he spoke at a future residence meeting and told us we could keep our Charter e-mails forever when the company says otherwise.

In case you’re wondering about how the vast right wing made me do these stupid things, it didn’t. I got that title from a title generator that I found through another blogger, The Spectacled Bean. I put ‘doing stupid things’ into the generator and laughed out loud when it came up with the title at top of this post. I’m not sure if 'Portent's Content Idea Generator' will become a part of my blogging MO but if you’ve been reading me for very long you’ll be able to tell those spoof titles from the ones my brains works so hard at churning out. It’s no secret that coming up with titles is my least favorite part about blogging. I had the same issue coming up with titles for art work back in the olden days when I needed to name paintings for exhibits. Screw the naming question. The bigger cliffhangers in my future according to the Gospel of Me is will I be able to paint again or did the years take away any talent I might have had?

My new phone got shipped and delivered in record time but I was ready for it. For some obscure reason it ported contacts from an older version that included a bunch of contacts for Levi that I had deleted when he died. No worries. I deleted them again and put the hard copy list I made in my emergency ‘Go Bag’ for a power outrage or the apocalypse, which ever comes first. 

Next step was to start the porting process for transferring my landline number to the my new cell and if you read the comments section on my last post you know that is not going well. The saga continued for two mornings spent on hold and getting passed around Spectrum with different departments contradicting each other. Finally, I was given a phone number for Great Calls to call to find out why the rejection happened. Twice. Great Calls conferenced me in on the call to Spectrum and fingers crossed I'll know by Monday if the third port request works. If not, Great Calls was told by Spectrum to do the 4th request "manually" whatever that means. I'm so glad I didn't wait until closer to the move to go through this.

The house closing took place today but with hitch I wasn't expecting. Because my buyers were from out-of-state the title company couldn't issue me a check for my house until they get electronic copies of the buyer's notarized signatures. They didn't spring that twist on until the very end. Essentially, I signed my house over and had to walk out with a PROMISE the check would get hand delivered this afternoon. With so many moving parts, I feared something would go wrong. But it didn't. Got the check as promised but the bank says there's a two day hold on it which means I have to go back to get a cashier's check to make the final payment for my new place.

Since my husband’s (and my) grave marker is nearby the place where we closed I swung around to the cemetery so I could dig a hole for Levi’s ashes without getting caught. I was like Johnny Appleseed when I spread my husband’s ashes in two counties and at six places and that’s not counting the half a box of ashes buried at the cemetery, an ash locket I used to wear a lot and a four inch tall ash urn kept in a velvet box on my book shelve. Did I shed tears planting Levi's ashes into the ground? Yes, but not many and they were more about closure than the pain of loss. And for the fact that I probably won't get back up to this end of the county until my ashes are interred.

The day we interred my husband's ashes the sexton asked me if I wanted to be at the foot or head of the gravesite because Don’s ashes would be placed at the opposite end and it struck me that these three guys---two sextons and the funeral director---would probably judge our entire marriage dynamics by the answer I gave. I went back and forth trying to figure out a logical choice and finally I decided dead is dead and what difference could it possibly make what I picked or what these strangers thought. As hard as that decision was that day I don't remember what I decided nine years ago. Levi's ashes went as close to the stone as I could get them because I didn't want to accidentally dig up husband. That would be hard to explain.

Jeez, how did I get from vast right wing conspiracies making a person do stupid things to burying my dog’s ashes? If you can figure that out maybe you can help me step away from the computer and go find me some breakfast. My stomach is growling. ©

Emotional Intelligence and Dumb Phones

It’s only day three in the week and already I’ve had a unique experience to fill up time in my weird widowhood world where sometimes it seems like that’s all I’ve got is time. Woo is me. I want something more meaningful in my life but until I make that happen for myself I go to things like an OLLI class that was billed as “a stimulating and thought-provoking session about the fascinating field of emotional intelligence.” Would you sign up for a workshop like that if that’s all you knew about it? Thankfully I wasn’t the only one who was intrigued and foot-loose enough to act on that impulse. Fifty people showed up and we had a great time laughing our gray-haired heads off as we learned that emotional intelligence is about “managing our own emotions and the ability to ‘read’ emotions in others.” We talked about the nine ways people learn and how IQ alone is not an indicator of success in a person’s life. We talked about the characteristics of emotional intelligence---the other indicator of success---which includes handling relationships and being a self-motivator. We touched on that fact that emotions are impulses to act (flight or fight) and feelings are more mind based, our reactions to emotions and we base those reactions on our past experiences. 

I’d been to one of the speaker’s workshops two years ago so I knew he’d be entertaining. That one was titled, “I’m Dying to Talk to You” which was about end-of-life conversations. He had worked for Hospice for 25 years and he’s one of those people with a thousand anecdotes on the tip of his tongue and he likes to interact with his audience, letting us share stories as well. If he could be cloned he’d make the perfect “gift” to give to lonely widows and children you’d like to grow up to be good citizens of the world. Up for auction! One male who actually listens, who can tell funny stories, who has a generous heart and throws out sentences that you want to write down like, “Human souls don’t want to be fixed, they just want to be heard” and “we’re all recovering children” and Emra Bombeck’s “Worrying is like being in a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but does not get you anywhere.”

That last one about worrying is a hard habit to break. At least for me. If you don’t worry, you don’t troubleshoot your way out of potential problems. Or is that a cop-out, something I tell myself to justify things like getting naked in front of a dermatologist so he can look at my moles? What’s the difference between worrying and your mind subconsciously working on ways to avoid what you’re worried about? My biopsies came back, by the way, and two are cancerous so I’m scheduled for what they call “surgery” but is really just them digging out more skin around where the moles were removed for the biopsies. Sorry, Emra, but my ‘rocking chair’ did get me somewhere. 

Changing topics: I bought a new smart phone that was absolutely the stupidest phone I’ve ever had and between Don and me we’ve had a lot of cell phones going back to the ‘80s when Motorola bag phones first came on the market. (See photo above.) Can you believe it, the plan we had with that first cell phone was $9.99 a month for life for unlimited calls and we were able to keep that plan, transferring it to upgraded phones, until 2005. We finally voluntarily gave up the contract because the company got fussy and would only let us use it with a basic cell phone and I wanted one with more bells and whistles on it. But I still have that same cell phone number---31 years!

The phone I bought had some (new to me) features on it that I wanted like voice texting and voice maps but what it didn’t have the ability to get itself activated. After making four calls to the company spread out over 11 days and waiting on hold for over four hours finally a technical support guy declared the phone is defective and they’d send me a pre-activated phone to make a swap. The good news is they said they’d wave the $35.00 activation fee and drop five dollars off the monthly service fee. The bad news is when the phone arrived today in the mail it wasn’t the right model. It was a phone that cost nearly $100 less than I paid! Back on the phone I went but this time I had a direct line to technical support so I didn’t wait on hold. I got the apologizes one would expect and the promise that they’d use overnight delivery to get me the right phone. This whole saga has been frustrating but I’ve kept my cool through it all. However, if one more thing goes wrong with this fiasco my emotional intelligence will go down the drain and I’ll be back here writing Dumb Phones, Part Two. And I’ll be naming names. ©