Good-bye, old phone number!
Aug. 10th, 2012 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73We turned off our land line last week.
Much of the reason why is that, like most other folks, both my husband and I have cell phones. We both have pay-as-you-go plans, and even my usage doesn’t quite come up to the monthly cost of maintaining a land line. The portability of a cell phone number is an obvious win over the land line. If, God forbid, I ever have to call 911 on my cell phone while at home, the 911 address I have on file with my carrier will even be correct, so the argument of a land line for emergency use goes away as well.
Not that the land line could be counted on in an emergency, mind you. There were several occasions when my mother would try to call us and be met with an automated message along the lines of “your call cannot be completed at this time”. Every so often I’d call the house on my cell and the call would be disconnected before it went through. When I then called my husband’s cell phone and asked him to check what the land line was doing, it would be dead. It always recovered within half an hour or so, and of course it never misbehaved when we asked the phone company to look into it. Nonetheless I would hate to have to wait half an hour just for the privilege of having the 911 people automatically know the address of my house - you know, the one that had mostly finished burning down by then?
But the main reason we’re so pleased to be rid of our land line is our disconnection with our old phone number. People kept calling our number expecting it to be the county jail, and with good reason: even the jail gave out our phone number as being the jail phone number.
As a side note, we would have changed it ... except that we’d signed up for DSL when we moved in (give us a break, this was back in 2002), and the company required at least one phone statement in order to start providing service. We figured out pretty quickly that there was this identity crisis with our phone number, but we didn’t want to have to wait an extra month for an Internet connection that was faster than 14.4K baud (which was all we could manage at the time via my employer). Then by the time our DSL finally got connected, our friends and relatives all had our house number as our main contact number (back in 2002 cell phones were somewhat less common, and Skype hadn’t been invented yet), so it seemed silly to change. In the - gulp - ten years since, I proclaim laziness as the chief impediment to changing our house number.)
We got calls from an astonishing variety of places. There was the expected assortment of locals wanting to find out about a friend or relative. If they sounded distraught, we were generally helpful; if they didn’t, we were sometimes helpful but would request that they pass the _actual_ number for the jail back to whoever had given them our number. Because our area has a large Hispanic population, some of whom wanted to reach the jail, I memorized the Spanish for ‘this is not the jail’: ‘no es la carcel.’ (‘No es la carcel’ is more informative but overall more troublesome, than ‘Yo no se habla espanol,’ which is what I resorted to the first time that a Spanish-only speaker called for the jail. It turns out if you just say ‘No es la carcel,’ the caller assumes you actually speak Spanish, and hijinks ensue.)
There was the occasional out-of-county lawyer’s office. There was the time some hospital called. There was even a time that some sheriff’s office in Arizona, of all places, was trying to reach the county jail. (We helped the sheriff’s office. We figured you don’t want to get on the bad side of a sheriff.)
Within a year or so of having the phone number that we did, we changed the outgoing message so that it went something like this: “You have reached [our names]. This is not the county jail. If you’re trying to reach the jail, please call [other number]. If you wish to leave a message for [us], please do so at the beep.” If we came home and found up to three blank messages within a few minutes of each other, we knew that someone hadn’t caught the correct number the first time. Occasionally some dumbnut would leave a message for the county jail despite the outgoing message. And two, maybe three times over the last ten years, someone has left a sympathetic message and/or a promise to pass the information along.
Interestingly, if you look up the San Mateo County Jail contact information on the Internet today, you will not find our old phone number. Instead, you’ll find the generic number you call to get to most county offices, and presumably you can then be instructed on what extension you need to call to reach the jail. Perhaps the error is only propagated through word of mouth now, and the occasional poster. Whatever the cause, perhaps the next owner of our phone number will be spared the annoyance of being thought the county jail.
We do not now have, nor ever have had, any connection with the jail, nor have we at any time in the past. (Just don’t try telling our indoor-only cats that.) It’s lovely to be rid of the false association. Meanwhile, anyone want a serviceable phone or answering machine?
Much of the reason why is that, like most other folks, both my husband and I have cell phones. We both have pay-as-you-go plans, and even my usage doesn’t quite come up to the monthly cost of maintaining a land line. The portability of a cell phone number is an obvious win over the land line. If, God forbid, I ever have to call 911 on my cell phone while at home, the 911 address I have on file with my carrier will even be correct, so the argument of a land line for emergency use goes away as well.
Not that the land line could be counted on in an emergency, mind you. There were several occasions when my mother would try to call us and be met with an automated message along the lines of “your call cannot be completed at this time”. Every so often I’d call the house on my cell and the call would be disconnected before it went through. When I then called my husband’s cell phone and asked him to check what the land line was doing, it would be dead. It always recovered within half an hour or so, and of course it never misbehaved when we asked the phone company to look into it. Nonetheless I would hate to have to wait half an hour just for the privilege of having the 911 people automatically know the address of my house - you know, the one that had mostly finished burning down by then?
But the main reason we’re so pleased to be rid of our land line is our disconnection with our old phone number. People kept calling our number expecting it to be the county jail, and with good reason: even the jail gave out our phone number as being the jail phone number.
As a side note, we would have changed it ... except that we’d signed up for DSL when we moved in (give us a break, this was back in 2002), and the company required at least one phone statement in order to start providing service. We figured out pretty quickly that there was this identity crisis with our phone number, but we didn’t want to have to wait an extra month for an Internet connection that was faster than 14.4K baud (which was all we could manage at the time via my employer). Then by the time our DSL finally got connected, our friends and relatives all had our house number as our main contact number (back in 2002 cell phones were somewhat less common, and Skype hadn’t been invented yet), so it seemed silly to change. In the - gulp - ten years since, I proclaim laziness as the chief impediment to changing our house number.)
We got calls from an astonishing variety of places. There was the expected assortment of locals wanting to find out about a friend or relative. If they sounded distraught, we were generally helpful; if they didn’t, we were sometimes helpful but would request that they pass the _actual_ number for the jail back to whoever had given them our number. Because our area has a large Hispanic population, some of whom wanted to reach the jail, I memorized the Spanish for ‘this is not the jail’: ‘no es la carcel.’ (‘No es la carcel’ is more informative but overall more troublesome, than ‘Yo no se habla espanol,’ which is what I resorted to the first time that a Spanish-only speaker called for the jail. It turns out if you just say ‘No es la carcel,’ the caller assumes you actually speak Spanish, and hijinks ensue.)
There was the occasional out-of-county lawyer’s office. There was the time some hospital called. There was even a time that some sheriff’s office in Arizona, of all places, was trying to reach the county jail. (We helped the sheriff’s office. We figured you don’t want to get on the bad side of a sheriff.)
Within a year or so of having the phone number that we did, we changed the outgoing message so that it went something like this: “You have reached [our names]. This is not the county jail. If you’re trying to reach the jail, please call [other number]. If you wish to leave a message for [us], please do so at the beep.” If we came home and found up to three blank messages within a few minutes of each other, we knew that someone hadn’t caught the correct number the first time. Occasionally some dumbnut would leave a message for the county jail despite the outgoing message. And two, maybe three times over the last ten years, someone has left a sympathetic message and/or a promise to pass the information along.
Interestingly, if you look up the San Mateo County Jail contact information on the Internet today, you will not find our old phone number. Instead, you’ll find the generic number you call to get to most county offices, and presumably you can then be instructed on what extension you need to call to reach the jail. Perhaps the error is only propagated through word of mouth now, and the occasional poster. Whatever the cause, perhaps the next owner of our phone number will be spared the annoyance of being thought the county jail.
We do not now have, nor ever have had, any connection with the jail, nor have we at any time in the past. (Just don’t try telling our indoor-only cats that.) It’s lovely to be rid of the false association. Meanwhile, anyone want a serviceable phone or answering machine?
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-11 03:02 pm (UTC)Yay for off-loading the land line though. Sometimes it is just nice to simplify things, even if you don't have the added complication of this situation.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-11 09:12 pm (UTC)