I am perhaps dating myself when I admit that we have a land line phone in our house.
It was initially a safety net, because Jackie and I were with a lacklustre cell phone service–I won’t say the company name for not wanting to ruffle any legal feathers, but let’s just say it rhymes with Scrogers–whose cell signal would ebb and flow like crazy (without moving around the house, one moment I would have three of four data signal bars showing and in a heartbeat it may drop through every other data connection option and just drop the call completely)–and because Jackie was pregnant at that point (spoiler alert: it was mine), she wanted a sure-fire way to get in touch with people if needed, so the landline was necessary.
Fair enough, thought I.
Since then, however, we’ve switched to a far superior cell phone service (it isn’t one of the big three companies in Canada, but is a company that piggybacks on one of the big three’s service, whose company name I won’t say but it rhymes with Brell) and so we don’t really need the land line, but it’s been tied into internet and TV packages we get. If we dropped the land line, we’d actually be paying more per month than we already do, which seems dumb, but there you have it.
To underscore my point of its being largely useless, however, it has proven itself to receive almost exclusively scams or cold calls.
But has occurred to me that the landline number is a 416 area code, Toronto’s original, which is becoming increasingly hard to get as the city’s population swells. They’ve now added not just one but two other area codes to the city region. I’m not thinking that we’d be able to make any money by auctioning off the number eventually (although…), but our daughter will be getting a cell phone at some point, of course, so I’m considering hanging onto it for her to have the number. It’ll be a classic by that point. Of course, the opposite has occurred to me, too: That her 416 number won’t be cool but will be so old by that point that she’ll be made fun of by all of her friends. Could cell phone numbers go the way of fashion? “Oh, you have a 416? That’s cute. My area code is one of the new ones that just came out last week.”
But that’s all down the road. Point being, here and now the number is proving that its primary purpose is being a lightning rod for spam and cold calls. We’ve had everything from the CRA scam (Canada Revenue is filing charges against us, so we’d better call this number to make immediate arrangements to send them money or we’ll be arrested), to duct cleaning companies offering their services (we’ve heard stories of cold call duct cleaning companies just showing to do an okay job while they’re really casing the place, plus we’re already book with a legit service for that anyway), to the Windows computer scam (‘We’re calling from the Windows central office and your computer is showing it has problems, so you need to download and install this program to correct the issue’; related: After telling them for years that they must have the wrong number because I had a Mac and not a Windows computer, they got wise, and I eventually had one call that told me that there was a problem with my Windows or Mac computer…), and the list goes on.
Yesterday was a new one. A pretty young sounding guy said he was calling from some mortgage company and he wanted to tell me some of the options they had. Suffice to say, we aren’t looking around for a new mortgage company (I mean, how relatively few people are?), which means this poor schmuck is going down a list of probably thousands of phone numbers to call up and pitch whoever answers on the idea of changing a mortgage to their company.
I told him we were locked into a mortgage with a bank (true), so we wouldn’t be able to even consider other options.
There was a long pause and then a very meek, “… okay.”
It felt like I’d just kicked a puppy, or something, the way he sounded so dejected. But look, kid, you’re calling people out of the blue and trying to get them to shift tens or hundreds of thousands (or in this city, perhaps millions) of dollars in value to your company, just, what… on the spot? You’ve got to realize that’s going to be a hard sell.
Which makes me wonder how he got looped into this. What, did he apply to some greasy dude’s ad in the back of a community newspaper and show up to be fast-talked into this gig? Talked up like this would be a cushy job?
“You know what I like about you, Kevin?”
“Leo.”
“Right. You know what I like about you?”
“No?”
“You’ve got… IT.”
“It?”
“It. As soon as you came through that door, I told myself, that guy has it. Why, if he called me up on the phone and wanted me to buy something, I’d buy five of them. Not a lot of people have it, y’know. Everyone wants it. Only a few people have it. And you? You have it.”
“I do?”
“In spades. So here’s what you do, okay? You get this list every morning, and you start at the top, you call the number, you ask to talk to the home owner, you tell them we’ve got some options for mortgages for them, right? And because you’ve got it, they basically can’t say no. It’s easy money. You think you can sit on the phone and just let the money roll in?”
“… yes?”
“Good. Here’s your list–I’ll just brush off the cigar ashes there… oh, and don’t worry about that wet patch that smells like Jack Daniels, okay? If you can’t make out those numbers, just go to the ones you can see. It doesn’t fuckin matter. Okay, get out of my office. Use the open desk with the phone out there–“
“You mean the only one out here? With the missing file drawer and the broken chair?”
“That’s the one. And you can’t use the bathroom, okay? It’s clogged from that Vietnamese I had last night, so you need to use the gas station down the block. Lunch is a half hour and you get two fifteens, and don’t think I’m not watching the clock on all of them. Now get dialing. Easy money. Go.”
Yeah, so in any case, the landline has been great.