The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Go Phish Yourself

It’s Monday morning and the phone is ringing off the hook. Medicare, Microsoft scams, phishers and god only knows what low-life scum hoping for some poor schnook to hand out social security numbers and bank accounts. What I’m slowly coming to realize is that I’m one of the last people in America and possibly the globe who still owns a listed landline. A few days ago a Molly called six times in the space of a few hours to alert me to possible fraudulent credit card activity on an account we don’t even have. And no, in case you’re wondering, I don’t have Caller I.D. I pick up the phone, just like in the good old days, and say hello.

Lately I get calls from robots. “Is this Skeeter?” they begin and once I acknowledge that indeed I am, the facsimile human voice goes immediately into its pitch. If I try to cut them off, they have no pause button. There’s no one there to pause. And yeah, I know in a month or two, they’ll have an automated voice that does respond appropriately, just a matter of coding with a tad more finesse. I have a real woman who calls every week. She is cheerful and bubbly and always starts with ‘it’s so good to hear a pleasant voice’ before mentioning the last hundred which were worse than her mother-in-law’s welcome or some such bogus bullshit you’d maybe think I’d have memorized by now but don’t.

For a time or two I tried to tell her she called a few days ago with the exact same pitch, but she talks over me and okay, maybe she’s not a she, probably she’s an It. I can’t tell anymore and trust me, once the androids come knocking on our door, I won’t be able to tell a cyborg from a Jehovah’s Witness. I suppose I could get an unlisted number, I know I could pay for a cellphone, I could always let the answering machine pick up and see if a human might be calling, but dammit, I hate to pay for privacy and I hate screening calls.

So I’ll probably just keep on picking up the phone when it rings, call me stupid,

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