Phoning Home
A year or so ago, we switched our home phone service from Verizon to Vonage. We hardly ever call out from our home phone because we have so many rollover minutes on our cell phones that we’re trying to use up, so when we moved into this house, we got the cheapest Verizon package available and added caller ID to it.
Caller ID, incidentally, has become my new favorite thing that I can’t live without (TiVo being the last such favorite thing). We don’t get many calls, and we don’t like to get many calls, but we get even fewer once we stopped answering all the “Unknown” and “Private” calls that inevitably involve lengthy sales pitches and repeated requests for “Mrs. Robert.” I can’t imagine living without it, and that’s why I was willing to pay the additional $7 a month or so that would let us bring this exciting technology into our home.
But our Verizon phone service was still costing us about $20 a month with all the taxes and surcharges, so finally we took the plunge and subscribed to Vonage.
With Vonage, we pay $16 a month which includes 500 minutes of outgoing calls to the U.S. and Canada each month, three-way calling, caller ID, voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding, and probably even more features that I don’t know how to use. We have never exceeded the 500 minutes and because the monthly fee is so cheap, I’ve been willing to put up with a few phone quirks.
For one thing, Vonage’s voicemail is stored online. We have our own answering machine, so we figured we wouldn’t have to ever worry about the online voicemail. It turns out that when the phone line is busy and a second call comes in, the second call goes to the Vonage voicemail if no one picks up. We discovered this only after my parents kept insisting they had left a message for us, and I found nothing on our answering machine. I had already started dropping hints about their old age and how they’d probably left their message on a complete stranger’s machine when Chris eventually discovered their voicemail message on our Vonage account online.
We turned off the online voicemail by forwarding all calls after a certain time period of ringing to Chris’s cellphone, which also came in handy when we found that our phone had a habit of going out occasionally when we had issues with our cable modem or with a power outage. But all in all, the minor inconveniences were nothing compared to the cheaper rate we were getting.
Today I tried to call home from work to check our messages. I had some difficulty getting a line from work as the phone didn’t seem to be working correctly, and after I dialed my home number, I heard a strange double ring.
The phone rang again, and a man answered the phone.
“Hello?” he said.
I was so startled by his voice that I nearly hung up right away. My immediate thought was that I had disturbed an intruder in our home. Cleverly, I decided I should disguise my knowledge from him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.” Good lord, had he killed my dogs?!?
The man paused oddly. “Okay,” he said finally, and hung up.
I wondered why he’d paused. Most people think nothing of wrong numbers who call their house. As a matter of fact, just last week I’d told a caller to my dad’s house that my name was Jane and my mother was in Taiwan, only to find out that he was no one I knew and a wrong number. (In my defense, the caller had asked for my name and how my mother was doing, and since he was acting like he knew me, I figured he must be a friend of my parents.)
Because of the pause on the phone, now I knew I was right and that someone was in our house. After all, what were the chances that I’d misdialed my own home number, a number that I called so frequently when I was away that Chris spent more time talking to me than when I was home with him?
It was a time of crisis, and so it was time to email Chris.
“i just tried to call our home to check messages,” I typed to him, “and some guy answered. Could you try?”
I didn’t have time to go into my home intruder theory, but felt that information was self-evident from my email.
Chris wrote back almost immediately.
“That was me on my cellphone!!!!” he wrote, punctuated by many “HA HA HA HA”s. “You didn’t recognize me.”
Apparently our phone was out again. I felt foolish momentarily, but rallied quickly.
“Well, did you recognize me? You didn’t say anything!” I wrote.
He replied, “I guess I didn’t recognize you either. But you barely said anything, just ‘wrong number’ and hung up on me! Didn’t give me a second to think about it…”
So the lesson of the day is that when home intruders answer your telephone, you should give them a few seconds to respond appropriately. And maybe if you wait long enough, you’ll be able to recognize your spouse’s voice.
Posted by: Supersonic Jane | November 28, 2005 | 3:34 pm
Posted in: This Life