Caller ID Hell

Remember the good old days when you could call someone you had a crush on and hang up when they answered the phone and no one would be the wiser?  Today, you can’t even dial a number and hang up without the person calling you back and asking who you are and what you want.

I entered caller ID hell when I returned a call from a customer with a problem, and hung up without leaving a message when there was no answer. In a millisecond my phone rang and the conversation went something like this:

Me:   Hello? (Question mark intended, as the phone rang so fast after I hung up I thought I had misdialed something and caused it to ring back by accident and no one would really be there.)
Her:  Who’s this?
Me:   Ah, who’s this?
Her:  Why did you call this phone?
Me:   What phone?
Her:   The phone you just called.
Me     Um, let’s start over – who are you trying to reach here?
Her:   Are you having an affair with my husband?

And so it went, because apparently the customer who called in a complaint had a jealous wife who had some of her own complaints about him, and was doing some pretty intense investigative work to confirm her suspicions. And if you think the situation was cleared up quickly as we laughed about the misunderstanding, talked about the crazy weather we are having and hung up as BFF, you would be wrong as she continued to call me all day, every day, several times an hour, telling me to stay away from her husband.  

It didn’t matter that her husband was a customer of my company, and that I worked at that company, and that I was, in fact, the person someone would call to file a complaint with, as she sneered menacingly “What a convenient excuse”.

So I called ‘the husband’ (because you have to say THE husband under these circumstances), using his business number instead of the cell phone number that started this mess in the first place, and asked him to please explain the misunderstanding to his wife so she would stop calling me every hour. He just laughed and said “You try to talk to her!”. When I responded that I may need to ask the police to intervene if it did not stop, he simple chuckled “PLEASE!” and hung up.

“And then what happened?” you are probably thinking.

You guessed it; the phone rang a millisecond later. And I answered it, hoping it was ‘the husband’ telling me had straightened out the situation, but it was instead ‘the wife’, who was also his office manager, which explains how she had instant access to both his cell and business phone.

“If you are not having an affair with my husband, tell me how you have both his cell and work phone numbers?!” she demanded.

Ah Yi Yi!

And so it went for weeks. And while I wish I was exaggerating for the sake of a good story, I’m not. Eventually, I made it a point to answer the phone every time I saw her number because it took less time out of my work day to try to talk her down than listen to the “maximum recording time reached” rants and the constant ring of the phone.

Believe it or not, after a few months she called me to say she had left her husband and “he was now all mine”.

‘Situation over?’ you wonder.  Not so fast, as I saw the business phone number light up my caller ID a week later.

“Be careful,” my now former customer said “My wife is crazy, and I wouldn’t walk alone to your car if I were you.”

“But she has no idea what I look like…” I responded confidently. “She looked you up on the internet.” he countered. "She said you are my type'".

And while I realize that technology is not directly to blame for my dilemma, it has given unstable people advanced ammunition to intimidate and bully others.

But on the positive side, I've finally learned to live in the moment, although not zen-like as I had aspired to, as I hurry to my car each night, hood up and scarf over my nose, craning my neck owl-like, acutely aware of every inch of the 360 degrees around me, wondering if this story will ever really have an ending.