“Remoted” – Workday 50 / Day 65 (Wednesday)

Tonight, I spent a couple minutes listening to several saved voice mails to get to a call from my doctor’s office that I missed, half listened to the message and saved, figuring I'd “get to it later.” Once a voice message is saved, I’m stuck listening to all of them to get to the latest one. These saved messages are not the loving words of, well, anyone. Most were saved for the intrigue. There is one from a female that goes on for about 30 seconds in a language that isn’t English, French, Spanish, or Korean, which is the full extent of tongues familiar to my ear. (I’m not saying I know all these languages, but I can usually recognize them.)

Another message is a very stern sounding man who says, in his clipped enunciation, “This is the FBI.” He goes on to inform that they have tracked my “phonestamp” and I “will be busted in 30 minutes.” Does the FBI really call in advance of arresting people? Is that in case you need to freshen up, and maybe put out some snacks for the now-expected guests?

Another message is from a robotic male automated voice that starts in progress with “the authorities” and I should “revert immediately” on their number, (which is reeled off twice), before they “begin legal proceedings.” Then the robot automaton closes with “thank you, and have a nice day.” Such a polite robot. Which authorities? Port Authority? Sports Authority? And “revert” is a peculiar way of saying “call.”

Maybe I'll take your
next call about the
pretend job.

For the past three Tuesdays, there have been calls from the same 800 number. The Tuesday rotation 800 caller identifies herself as “Adrianne” and says she is calling from “Energy Networks” about my resume. This week, her team needed an answer and asked that I call to let her know if interested in the position. Now, I haven’t floated a resume in over four years, so if “Adrianne” is really calling about a position I might have applied for, at this point I’m most definitely not interested. 

After this week’s call, I did a reverse lookup on the phone number (I love research!) to discover a string of comments back to at least 2013 about callers from the same number. The caller names change, but there are many comments detailing the same speil, which always starts out claiming to be a call about a job, then turns into a hard sales pitch of some sort. I considered blocking the number, but now I’m thinking maybe I should answer the next call, which, if the pattern of the last three weeks follows, will be on Tuesday. Armed with multiple reports of how the call usually flows, I could have my own script to play along. We’ll see. Sometimes  it’s more fun to imagine such things than to actually do them.