Dial a friend
SO the cellphone rings in the middle of a cool afternoon.
Although my phone shows the calling party’s 11-digit mobile number, it fails to identify to whom it belongs.
Which is a puzzlement.
After all, ever since I got myself a fairly sophisticated phone early this year, I have kept the contact details of some 200 important individuals, many of whom have yet to be reminded of my existence.
And since none of them have ever replied to my text messages, they can hardly be expected to call me up.
As such, the Friday afternoon call was obviously initiated by my credit card company’s much-reviled, much-abused contact center agent, suffering from stress and sleep deprivation, which may somehow result in occasional breakouts of facial acne.
Whenever I pick up these calls, the said agent—most of the time female—will inquire one, whether I have already received my billing statement, and two, whether I have already remitted payment.
In a generous effort to share misery, I almost always reply to both questions in the negative, even though the two conditions have already been satisfied.
But when I answered the call during that afternoon, I discovered that the calling party had exceeded my expectations.
Instead of a Filipina with an American accent at the other end, a masculine voice asked me—all of a sudden—who I was. Like any neurotic worth his paranoia, I merely continued to talk without disclosing any personal information, curious as to why this person wanted to know my name.
To get on my good side, he rephrased the question and explained his situation. After introducing himself, V. told me that he needed to know why his landline phone was being charged for a call to my cellphone number. Since we didn’t know each other—at least not in this life—he neither recognized my number nor did he remember placing such a call.
He then asked me whether I could help him explain to his phone company that the billing was erroneous. After all, he lived alone, received very few visitors, and was not employed as a telemarketer.
And when I learned that his phone company and my internet service provider were one and the same, I told him I was with him for the long haul. This was my way of exacting revenge, however little, on the company which screwed us both—V. with his false billing and me with so many dropped internet connections that has fouled up many a deadline.
Unfortunately, the day of reckoning never came.
Thanks to my cellphone’s log, and V.’s journal, we both find out that the call had indeed been made by a mutual friend who flew in from New York, stayed in V.’s apartment for a few hours, and took liberties with his landline without telling him.
As a result, V. and I now occasionally text each other, checking up on each other, still amazed that we got to know each other through what initially appeared as a wrong number.
