Is your refrigerator running?

Perhaps you remember the crank phone calls that kids made, sometimes at random and sometimes to targeted friends or enemies.  When the person answered, the caller might ask, “Is your refrigerator running?” When the response was, “yes” the giggling kids would say, “then you’d better go run after it!” and hang up.

Those calls actually had an impish innocence about them, but, as the communications industry aged, so did we users and so did the pranks. Heavy breathing, middle of the night annoyance calls became concerns. Forty years ago someone played the ‘guess who this is’ game and I was naïve enough to fall for it. He sounded like a friend from college. We had maybe a 10 minute conversation before the light dawned on me. Phone companies developed ways to trace calls in much more complicated means than what’s available today. The introduction of answering machines and caller ID helped eliminate the petty callers.

Now we’ve got robocalls and sophisticated scam ‘artists’ and stalkers. A friend was the recipient of the “we’ve-just-discovered-you-owe-some-back-taxes-and-we-need-to-quickly-clear-this-up-so-give-me-your-credit-card” call. While I was driving home the other day my cellphone rang, so I pressed the Bluetooth button on the steering wheel and said ‘hello.’ A man said he was calling from Microsoft because of all the error messages they were receiving from my computer. Some of us are not so trusting anymore and after a couple of unsatisfactory answers to my questions, I hung up.

In both of those cases – back taxes and we need to fix your computer – the topics are compelling and the presentation could sound feasible. Some people will fall for it and that makes me angry and sad. In both cases the callers had an accent. That perpetuates stereotypes and makes me even madder and sadder.

The fact that people deliberately figure out ways to take advantage of a person’s fears and trust is a reminder that there is evil in the world and that it comes in many forms. These callers are no different from bullies, elected officials who refuse to work for the common good, or rebels who shoot down airplanes and abduct children. These perpetrators’ actions rise from similar motivators, be it greed, anger, hatred, fear, revenge, or insecurity.

Things were much simpler in the rotary dial days when hoaxes were calls like, “Are the walls there?”

“No, I’m sorry you must have the wrong number. There are no ‘Walls’ here.”

“Then what’s holding up your roof?!”

I hope the beginning and joke above made you smile and that in between you were reminded of the need to balance faith with caution. But I also hope that like me, you believe the good will overcome the evil.

Marilyn