Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

as promised, the phone story

About seven or eight weeks ago, we started getting a raft of calls every day from people wanting to know why we had called them. (Different than the infrequent calls from old people looking for the Social Security Administration; apparently our number is similar to theirs.) Of course, we hadn't called them at all.

Most of these people appeared not to speak English as a native language and many were minorities. Some calls came from kids apparently playing with the telephone. Thus, they couldn't really grasp or believe that we hadn't called, and some of them were pretty hostile.

After a week or so of this annoyance, B called the phone company and eventually got a callback from a repair department person who suggested that something might be amiss in the nearest trunk line setup. Her solution: ask the callers to call the phone company themselves. Yeah, right.

The calls continued, and the next repair person suggested that cordless phones like ours sometimes dial other numbers and even "grab signal" from other nearby cordless phones and call using other people's numbers.

Meanwhile, the calls continued, as many as 20 a day - mostly hangups, and we switched the answering machine to pick up after the first ring, with a message that explained the situation.

Fat lot of good that did, and after some more calls, including speaking with some of the more clueful people about what number they THOUGHT they were calling, we decided to test the phone company's hypothesis about cordless equipment.

Hypothesis: our cordless phone dials other numbers and leaves our number as a callback.

Experimental protocol: switch out cordless for a couple of conventional phones that were hanging around the place. Leave in place for several days to ensure "fresh" callbacks. Assess resultant call volume.

Results: no diminuation in calls.

Analysis and discussion: cordless phones are not the issue.

B called the phone company again, this time with information from one of our politer callers about the number that was displayed. After badgering the phone company representative to do her job (she had suggested that WE should call these parties and try to figure it out), we came up with a new explanation: that the people who call us are manually dialing the number based on what appears on their callback screen. But, instead of dialing the number in full (1 plus 10 digits) they are skipping the '1' and the call is going through as a local call using the area code displayed on their screens as the exchange of our number and truncating the last three digits.

The phone company chick was able to find out who holds the real number, and it's a collection call center in Arkansas. Thus the calls we have been getting are from dumbass deadbeats annoyed at the harrassment from the collections agency. B called the collections agency and they were very nice but there's not much they can do, and it's not really their fault that they have to collect from morons.

We on the other hand have the option of getting a new phone number. Depending on what happens with the current pending job app, we will take advantage of that if we'll be here in the spring, or deal with the current situation if we are short-termers.

The calls have died down this weekend, probably because the call center isn't open.

Weird, huh?

Posted by otto0114 at November 25, 2006 12:55 PM