Phone calls and CRUFOTI

                When you move, you know you’ll have to go through a getting-adjusted process, a time when you receive mail and phone calls for individuals who formerly lived at your address or once held your new phone number.

          In Oxnard, we got calls for years intended for Mack’s Hoagie Hut. We finally learned the Hut was not an out of business business. It had a phone number one digit off from ours. After several months of annoyance, we started taking orders, promising quick delivery. We even ate there once and, cards on the table, the food was pretty good.

          The calls eventually slowed and the place went out of business.

          Here in Ohio, we’ve had two serial calls from interesting sources that have refused to stop bothering us, even after we follow their instructions to remove us from their call lists.

          The most impressive, by far, are the attempted calls we’ve gotten from some jailbird. We get a ring and a recording that a prisoner wants to have our number put on his okay to call list. We don’t know any prisoners that would be calling us.

My wife twice followed their process for having the number removed from the list, but we got another call from the same source. I called the company and they told me on the phone the calls would be blocked.

          I tried one more time to follow their process for number removal. If that fails, I have another idea. We call it Plan X.

          We may have to use Plan X on the bill collector that keeps calling us about a debtor. Those automated calls come and give us the name of the person they seek to collect from. “If you are not (this person),” the call says, “follow this process,” to get removed from the call list. So we followed the process and the calls have continued.

          It’s an automated caller, of course, and the voice tells us they are seeking someone named Vanity Brady. A little investigating gave us the proper name of the individual (the first name is not Vanity) for whom they seek and we’ll reveal that as well in the press release.

          I called the debt collector, too, and got assurances the calls would end. We’ll see.

          I’ve been waiting for the chance to use Plan X. It’s a dandy. The idea is to get many, many calls to the offending agencies from a variety of sources.

          Plan X, of course, is to issue a press release to every media member we can locate or think of in our state and the surrounding states about these phone calls. Lots of other people are probably getting these same calls, so we are doing the public a service with this free-of-charge press release.

The press release will include the name of the business that is responsible for the calls, the name of the debtor, the names of the folks we have talked to and the phone numbers we have called. Since our phone retains the numbers of incoming calls for a while, we have the numbers of the companies involved and each press release will include all the appropriate numbers.

          Hopefully, some news agency will pick up the story, one or both of them, and run with it (or them). Back in the old days, when journalism was something other than CRUFOTI (Crud Found On The Internet), newspapers would grab hold of something like a phone service claiming to be licensed by the Ohio state prison system, calling family phone numbers repeatedly, even after the number was supposed to be blocked.

          Heck, maybe the releases can become CRUFOTI, an international internet sensation. Maybe the CRUFOTI will generate annoying phone calls to the callers, just like the ones that bother us.

          If not, at least the calls helped generate another blog.

 

          Thanks for reading it.