When the phone rings, but it's not for you
Robocalls annoy everyone, but especially those who live alone
My landline telephone is a blessing and a curse, mostly a curse these days. What? I still have a landline? Yes, because cell reception in the woods where I live is not reliable. But I may have to learn to live without the landline.
Robocalls are driving me crazy. I receive as many as ten a day, several of which activate the voicemail function, but when I punch in the code, there is no message. The calls interrupt my sleep, work, meals, and everything else. How do I know they’re robocalls? Caller ID shows a location, usually in Oregon, rather than a name. I’m hearing from cities in Oregon I didn’t know existed. I can’t just block a number because it’s a different number every time.
I rarely answer. The day I came home from my Thanksgiving trip, I received five robocalls in one evening, having already received five during the day. I went around the house disconnecting phones. Enough! I left one hooked up with the ringer turned way down.
As a result, yesterday I missed two medical calls I needed. When I used my cell to call back, they couldn’t hear me. Damn.
I hate to unhook the number I have used for twenty-six years, the one I know always works. Sometimes, rarely, I see on Caller ID the name of someone I love or the business name for something I’ve been waiting for.
In scientific terms, it’s called partial reinforcement. If the rat never gets any food, he’ll stop pushing the lever. If he always gets food, he’ll keep coming back. And if he sometimes gets food, he will also keep coming back, just in case there’s something there.
Same with me and my phone. Also, with texts, email and social media. It’s usually junk, but that ring or ping promises something good. Someone thought of me, someone wants to talk to me, someone has news for me. When that little bit of happiness is met with silence or a disembodied voice yammering about Medicare or a book-publishing scam, I feel a pang of disappointment. I interrupted what I was doing to rush to the phone for nothing.
It’s like you have two empty water glasses that fill drop by drop with each contact. The one on the left takes only fresh water that makes you feel good. The one on the right is where the toxic water goes. Too often, the glass from which you shouldn’t drink overflows while the other remains empty and you remain parched. You are tempted to put both glasses away—disconnect, give up hope—rather than keep enduring this pain drop by drop.
Readers, when you like or comment on my posts, I get that good feeling. Thank you so much. If you know how to get rid of these robocalls, please tell me. Picking up the phone and screaming “Stop calling!” has not worked.
I promise this post was written by a real person, and I will never put junk in your inbox.
Oops. The phone is ringing. XO-Tampa with a local number? I’m not answering that.
Then there’s Claire . . .
Some of you may remember the Portuguese woman who started calling me last month from a nursing home to talk about my book and her many Portuguese connections. When I was in San Jose on my trip, I visited her. It was quite an experience.
Her name is Claire. As soon as I walked in, carrying a book to give her, the women at the desk got excited. “You’re the author! She has been waiting for you.”
They led me to a three-bed room where she has the space closest to the door. She is a very large woman, not mobile at all, confined to her bed. She wore a hospital gown, a flannel wrap around her head and face, and large pink glasses. Her swollen hands shook.
She said she had been praying I would come. I knew I didn’t deserve all this adulation. Lacking a chair, I sat on the edge of her bed, and we talked for an hour about people we knew in common, about her life and mine. I discovered that she earned a degree in social studies from San Jose State, also my alma mater. She wanted to teach but got married and raised kids instead. For many years, she and her husband ran a Portuguese deli in the San Diego area, but she came back to San Jose after they divorced.
She showed me the tablet that she uses as a telephone to keep in touch with people. That phone is her lifeline. She can only receive calls on it from a few approved people. Her son has blocked everyone else. Others need to call the front office and have them bring a portable phone, if the phone is available and someone has time.
Claire is 79 years old. She has been in that bed for eleven years. Eleven years. Let that sink in.
She asked if it bothered me to be in a place like that. A man down the hall was hollering. The skeletal woman in the next bed kept moaning. I assured her I had spent so much time in nursing homes with my husband and my parents that it felt like home.
But it still hurt my heart.
A blessing and a curse, the telephone. I’m glad it introduced me to Clare.
Further reading
The Impact of Spam Calls on Mental Health and Productivity.
stop_unwanted_robocalls_and_texts.pdf
Taking Arms Against a Sea of Robocallers | Psychology Today
Photo by Sue Fagalde Lick—Old school phone at motel in Yreka, California
BTW, I will be participating in another Childless Elderwomen’s chat on Zoom on Sunday, Dec. 15, at noon Pacific time. Our topic is solo aging, and we have a bang-up panel of women you will love. If you register here, you can join us live or receive the recording afterward.
I highly recommend this Substack post by our leader Jody Day, “The 3am bag lady blues.” She addresses that fear of growing old alone that many of us share.
How did I end up alone? My first marriage ended in divorce. My second husband died of Alzheimer’s after we had moved to the Oregon coast, far from family. I never had any kids, only dogs. Now I live by myself in a big house in the woods. You can read our story in my memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available now at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.
There's a National" Do Not Call" registry that you can sign up on for each of your phone numbers ( cell and landline). You have to sign up every 12 months and if businesses still call you, they can" get in trouble"(?? What kind of trouble? I have no clue!) It's worth a shot, it has definitely reduced the number of robocalls I receive.
You just go online at www.donotcall.gov and register your numbers. Good luck!
We still have our landline as well as cell phones for a whole bunch of reasons. Recently a younger relative admitted to me they wished they had kept theirs. Now it would be expensive to reconnect. For some reason, we don't get a lot of robo calls. That was so kind of you to visit Clare. I've had to experience my mother-in-law and my father being in nursing homes. It was heartbreaking.