Voicemail

For months now I've been getting these phone calls at work from a 312 area code and this person never leaves a voicemail. I'll come back from lunch, see my blinking voicemail light, check it, and it's a message that's two seconds long of ther person just hanging up. I figure if they don't want to leave a message, then they're creepy, and I'm not going to return a call to some unknown number with an unknown reason for calling me.

Recently, over the past 6 weeks or so, my phone would ring and I would see that 312 number and just not pick up. I'd sit there, staring at my phone, waiting for them to leave a message, and they never would. So I'd never pick up.

There's a point you reach where you don't want to pick up the phone when you see certain numbers. It's like when that drunk friend calls at 3:12 a.m. and you just don't want to deal with them. Certain area codes mean trouble, and those are:

A) Dallas area codes, like 214 and 972. Those typically mean it's a PR person in Dallas who wants you to cover something clearly outside your county coverage, and you have to come up with a nice way to say no.

B) 202, 212 and 312, which are area codes for DC, NYC and Chicago. All of these mean it's a PR person who's representing someone in North Texas who typically doesn't know jack shit about your newspaper or what you cover but they're gonna try to get an article in your paper anyway. And they want you to listen to it. They also want to call you and make sure you got the spam-ish e-mail they sent over, too.

So I just never picked up this number. It's been months now.

Today, I accidentally picked up the 312 number when I was half-distracted reading a news article online. It was a PR person I'd talked to eons ago about some start-up home health care company in the area, and she wanted to know if we'd done something about it. (Answer: No. I need a news peg, people. I know we're weekly, but I gotta get a news peg of some sort.)

She and I had a brief discussion where I told her I needed dates for openings and updated contact information for the business, and at the end of the conversation she asked if she could call me back with that info and leave me a voicemail if I wasn't there.

Seriously? Seriously.

I wanted to laugh. Of course you can leave me a voicemail. It had this vague impression that she didn't leave one because she didn't know if she could or something. I told her I check my voicemail every day and usually return calls the same day, and part of me wanted to tell her that if she'd left me a voicemail 3 months ago, she wouldn't have had problems finally reaching me.

The Red Sox lost. This means I no longer have to watch any baseball for the rest of the year. Oh well. Top Chef starts soon, and honestly, that's almost as big of a nail-biter. Project Runway would have been, but we all knew who should win, and when she did America wasn't surprised. We were just glad we didn't have to deal with any nasty dramatic turns of events.

I went through mail yesterday. My 401k lost about $236 in the period. Given how small mine is, that's a lot. It made me sad. But my mutual fund made $1.68 or something, so I'm gonna live large and buy myself that Big Gulp diet Coke I've had my eye on.