Author: John S. Adams
Title:Hoyt, H. 1939: The structure and growth of residential
neighborhoods in American cities. Washington, DC: Federal Housing
Administration
ource:Progress in Human Geography; Jun2005, Vol. 29 Issue 3, 321-325, 5p
I don't want to read this right now but I might someday.
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?
In the last 10 days, I've taught 5 classes, flown to the East Coast for a campus visit/interview, attended two meetings to observe faculty service, and rehearsed my job talk with my committee. Whew!
Basically, my only obligation for the rest of the term is to finish out teaching my course: three remaining sessions.
I am really looking forward to delving into dissertation work this weekend and in the weeks to come. I have about three weeks til the end of the semester, and then another week before Christmas, which, depending on where we are, could be productive or not. I got some real energy building from working on the job talk: it really helped to give me some ideas of where my project should be going. (Even though it was nerve-racking to work on it, and hard to process so many suggestions, and frustrating to figure out how to put it together.)
I have a telephone anecdote to share for my next posting. Stay tuned.
I seem never to blog here anymore. Why, I wonder: I'm no busier particularly than any other semester. I do have other blogs - one that is a resource for geography job-finding, and one that is about my progress towards being "PhinisheD" as the grad student support website has it.
Maybe I just feel guilty not writing a lot on my dissertation, and don't feel I "can" write here. Or maybe most of the observations I'd make involve other people and I don't want to be snarky, at least in a public forum. I see enough of that on various listserves, and it is sometimes momentarily amusing but mostly just sad. How quickly the abstract becomes the personal, in a really ugly, unproductive way. A Machiavellian lesson for my future in administration.
In other news, I'm applying for New England-based teaching jobs for next academic year and trying to keep up with my current teaching obligations. I have a pedagogy class that takes quite a bit of time. I have a weekly appointment with a native Polish speaker, which is great, but requires preparation too as I "take charge" of my own language education and develop some sort of plan every week for what we should talk about. No more crabbing about what works or what doesn't in the courses I take: I am the sole captain of my own future language facility at this moment.
Also I'm feeling a little down. It might be the impending cold and darkness of winter, or my relative isolation from working at home all the time, or my fears about the future, or just plain old not enough exercise. I am completely dependent on my own resources, and that's an odd feeling.