Calls in the night

Perhaps you, like me, remember laughing with friends as you made one of those childish prank phone calls. 

"Hello. Is your refrigerator running?"

"Yes."

"Then you'd better go catch it!"

Back in those days, in our random dialing, we were usually interrupting a housewife going about her daily chores. If we were daring, we tried the number of a classmate. It was extra funny if they were the one who answered, and we chortled even more as we took them by surprise with our linguistic humor. As long as we did it only once, the grownups shrugged their shoulders in a 'kids will be kids' kind of manner. Our trickster technology was a black rotary phone.

I remember getting my first disturbing call. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had just moved in to an apartment, settling in to be on my own. Not many people had my new number, so when the phone rang, I figured it to be one of a few friends or family wishing me well. My excitement was destroyed after the second "Hello?!" with no response except for heavy breathing. The technology that time was a green touch-tone phone.

Daytime calls like that were bearable, but the calls made in the night were really meant to intimidate. If you are of an age, you may have experienced them, when technology was a blue Princess phone on the bedside table. You knew that most of the time the perpetrator was simply dialing random numbers, but if they got a reaction that titalatted  them, they kept calling back. I was working for the phone company then, and went through training to help our customers deal with these situations. Log dates and times. Have a whistle by the phone. If the nature or frequency of the calls escalated, we would work with the police to put a trap on the line to trace the calls. We were glad when answering machines became one technology that helped, and later when caller ID became the norm.

This came to mind because we had a threatening phone call at the office last week. After doing what investigating and reporting that we could, learning that unlike on TV, in real life not all phone numbers are easily traceable, we determined that it was a hoax. I wrote an incident report and will work with our Health and Safety Committee to refine our policies.

A sad thing is these calls have gone from prank to crank, from childish to churlish. It's a troubling comment on our society that one way we decided this call was not targeting the employee, was that the wrong gender obscenity was used and that there was no racial overtone.The technology is now a call in voice mail or an insulting tweet in the night meant not just for one person but for millions.

I'm reminded of one of the standard old prank phone call scenarios:

"Is Sam Wall at home?"

"There is no Sam Wall here."

"Well, is Frank Wall there?"

"No."

"Are there any Walls there?"

"No."

"Then what's holding up the roof?!"

I don't know what to do about the fact that what once held up our collective roof is no longer there. That what we understood as decent is not what we see or hear from civil servants or leaders. That what was once common courtesy is not common. Perhaps we all need to be much more intentional about random acts of kindness to counteract the random discord making headlines.

Marilyn