My Home Phone Number

When I moved to Pelham in 1978, I got a new phone number. I say new, in fact it was new to me but it was the same number that the previous resident had. I never did understand that, as I thought that the phone company always held those numbers back for six months. Anyway, for years after I first moved here, I got calls intended for the Rev. Williams that had lived here. Eventually I guess the word got around and I stopped receiving his calls.

Time past, things changed and before you know it cell phones came on the scene. I was on my third or fourth cell phone with about as many carriers when I decided that I no longer needed a home phone. Sources smarter than I am insisted that it would be a shame for me to give up my home phone number that I had for so many years. I compromised and rolled it out to a VOIP carrier. After a couple of years, the carrier folded and I rolled it to another VOIP carrier. This summer I got an email from that second carrier saying that they too were going out of business.

Over the years, fewer and fewer of my friends and relatives call me on my home phone. In fact, fewer and fewer of them call me at all, but that is another matter that primarily revolves around the grim reaper. So, when this latest VOIP carrier folded, it would have been an opportune time to let the old phone number go. I was about ready to do just that when I remembered that I had a Pageplus prepaid phone that I use in areas where my regular cell phone carrier does not work. Why not just roll the old home number to the prepaid cell. Yeah, that's the ticket. So, that is what I did.

The VOIP phone usually went directly to voice mail but the prepaid cell is set up to ring 4 or 5 times and then go to voice mail. It sits here on my desk and when it rings, I see the caller id. I had been aware that I got a lot of telemarketer calls from looking at the VOIP log, but now that the number is right here before me, I have started checking the calls as they come in and actually programming a name into the cell to associate with these calls. So now when I get a call I look down and see, Scam, GiftCard Scam, Telemarketer, Security Sys, etc.

One of these days, when I am sufficiently satisfied that no one that I know is ever going to call me on the old number, I'll let it go. In the meantime it is interesting to see the diversity of scammers and telemarketers that are in operation. It almost reminds me of the good old days of identifying DX stations on a shortwave radio.