Calls and Misdemeanors

My friend Terry has been getting strange calls from some organization called "The Loan Department," offering him dubious home loans. Some of these are coming through on his cell, and when he inquires more about the organization, they get huffy and hang up on him.

I know these scammers are working from some random list, but I have to say the idea of Terry as an easy mark for this sort of fraud is pretty funny. That's the thing about these sorts of incidents: they are absurd on their face, but the more details that get added, and the more you know about the participants, somehow the more bizarre they often get. The demands of instant communication mean that politeness gets twisted into obligation in a moment, as total strangers thrust themselves upon you and insist that their needs are dealt with this very instant.

His narration of these events brought back an almost-forgotten episode I had once with a cell phone provided by an employer. I had been on the road all day, and it rang just as I was getting home - number unknown, but I had just started working for the organization and wasn't sure who it might be. I answered it and a querulous, female voice responded to my greeting with, "Hello?"

Oh, dear. Let's try again, "Hello, who is this please?"

"Are you one of my grandchildren?"

"No, ma'am. Who is this?"

"Who are you?"

I took a brief pause to soak in the unreality of it all, and grasp at the shreds of rationality I might have after a long, tedious day, too much of it spent in the car. Clearly this woman was old, confused, and it was incumbent upon me to muster up what little patience I could, no matter how tired I was, even as I stood laden with my briefcase and other detritus on my front porch, unable to enter my house without inadvertently dropping the call (our house is where cell phone signals go to die).

"Ma'am, you called me. My name is Jill. I am not one of your grandchildren. Can I help you somehow?"

Suddenly, a torrent of abuse flooded out of this woman. She had some sort of grievance with someone who had apparently been calling her and I, her misdialee, was literally on the hook for it. Patience, tolerance, pity for the old and confused, all was at an end. I was not the author of her discontents, and I was not going to be held accountable for them. I suppose you could say I have a poor track record with elderly, confused people who get me at random on the telephone. I am not proud to say that I hung up on her mid-flow, but I wasn't sure what else to do.

What are we to do with people who are suddenly there in whatever capacity, on the phone, in person, via e-mail, or via a comment on a website? What are our obligations to strangers (barring fraudsters like the ones Terry is coping with)? I really don't have a good answer. Simple rules of conduct may apply to the gross outline of a basic, hypothetical situation (basic politeness, golden rule, etc.), but what about the details of an actual situation? With so many ways to contact a person, what are our obligations as the ones contacted? Where accessibility and privacy clash, who wins?

Posted: Friday - February 23, 2007 at 07:33 AM | |