Rung Out

April Men's Room

The calls still come, even after twelve years. A bill has gone unpaid. A delivery waits for a signature. The bank has questions about a questionable check.

So they’ll pick up the phone, the collector and the supplier and the bank, and they’ll call. Me. Yet again. And, yet again, I’ll explain that they have the wrong number. Or, rather, they have the right number but the wrong person. I don’t owe the bill. I didn’t order the delivery. I didn’t write the sketchy check.

This routine began years ago, when I signed up for a landline telephone. That foolish, old-school decision is part of a series in which I’ve ignored consumer wisdom and marketplace trends and bought my own way. In the ’80s, for example, when everyone turned to VHS videocassette recorders, I got myself the Beta version. As the rest of the world shifted to palm-sized music players with wireless sound, I brought home stereo speakers that weigh 150 pounds apiece and connect with yards of wire. I once bought a Peugeot.

And since 2005, I’ve had this landline phone, which confines me to my house as I call people who are out walking their dogs, driving across the country, or doing things that I don’t want to think about them doing while they have me on the phone. Sure, I have a cell phone, but the landline has always felt like the natural way to make phone calls. Plus, I can hear better on the landline – with the cell phone, I can’t make a decent call in a coffee shop because of all the people in there talking on their cell phones.

“I can set you up,” the customer service guy said when I asked about the landline.

Then he gave me my new number. It had a couple of 6s, a 3, some 5s – a great phone number that I could remember right away. Unfortunately, so could lots of other people – mainly those who needed to speak with the couple who had just given up the number, possibly because they didn’t pay their bill.

Let’s call her Sherry and him Joe. Joe’s in construction; Sherry’s in sales. Over the years, I’ve spoken to Joe’s aunt, a sweet woman whose nephew didn’t tell her that he’d changed his number. I’ve talked to a cement company that had a truck waiting on a job site, but no Joe to say where to pour the stuff. A state agency left a message expressing its dismay that Sherry was selling with an expired license. Once, a day care center called, and both the caller and I asked, “What the #$%& kind of parent doesn’t give the day care an updated number?”

Then there are the countless calls from the countless debt collectors, all of them sounding courteous, if frustrated.

“I’m not them,” I say.

“Oh, OK,” they reply, and I’ll hear the doubt in their voices, the suspicion that I’m lying, the uncertainty about what to do next.

I can only wish them the best as they join the long list of folks who need to speak to Joe and Sherry about unfinished business.

“Good luck,” I always tell the callers.

Sometimes, one of the merciful ones will add, “Good luck to you, too.”

Then I hang up, and soon the phone rings again.

Tim Bass is coordinator of UNCW’s bachelor of fine arts program in creative writing.

To view more of illustrator Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.