Hello Silence, My Old Friend: A Series of Silent Phone Calls

This is an edited version something appearing in the July issue of my zine, "Subversive Creation"

November 2005- The first of the silent phone calls. The phone rings, rings, rings. I pick it up. "Hello?" I say. No answer. Nothing at all. "Hello?", I repeat uncertainly. Still no answer. Oh well. I hang up.

This was the start of the mystery of the serial silent phone calls.

Most calls from 1-800 numbers are not mysterious. You get to know what they’re about quickly enough, although extricating yourself from them tends to take longer.

It’s easy to get really annoyed with the person at the other end of the line, who’s intruding into your home to try to get you to part with your money, whether it’s for charity or to take advantage of a special offer to save money by spending it. But then, that person who’s annoying you and me by calling at dinnertime probably isn’t enjoying it either. Very few people work in call centres because they want to. They do it because they need the money. They might be students scraping by, juggling doing their studies and finding ways to pay the rent. They might be starving artists who are trying to not literally starve. And there are many other stories to hear about people working in call centres, all courtesy of our screwy priorities and screwy economy.

I wonder- what’s the story of the person behind the mysterious phone calls?

The calls came once a day or every two days. Was someone trying to say something to me or to the folks where I lived? The statement might have been the call itself- “I’m here- whoever I may be- and I can reach into your home whenever I want.” That was all. But why?

I knew it was a 1-800 number because I had one of those phones where the number of the caller appeared on the screen. I called that number and got a message that told me that I'd reached the Old Timers’ Hockey Challenge. All that told me was that someone at this organisation was calling my home repeatedly to say nothing- an interesting new approach to fundraising, taking the concept of the “soft sell” a step further.

It became a game for me, really. I kept a log of the calls registered, with the date and time of each. When I answered one of those calls I would adopt a singsong voice, saying things like ‘Hello-hello-hello? Hello? No hello? Then it’s time for goodbye. Goodbye-goodbye-goodbye”, or recite a (not very original) poem I wrote in response to this that started:

Hello silence my old friend,
You’ve come to talk with me again,
With words that will remain unheard,
And pauses that will never end...

The phone calls went on holiday during the Christmas break:

Wednesday Dec. 28, 2005- (Diary entry) “Whoever (is responsible) seems to be on vacation at the moment. There have been no calls since last Thursday. I wish that person an excellent vacation. But perhaps no person is responsible. Perhaps the calls have been due to a bizarre computer glitch, in which case I think the computer needs an excellent vacation. Computers have feelings too, as anyone who`s tried working with them can attest.”

Then...

Thursday Jan. 5, 2006: after a 2 week break, another silent call! The Christmas Vacation Theory was correct!

January 2006- anticlimax!: The calls only went on for a few days this time, and ended as inexplicably as they began. Now I’ve just realized as I write this: I have gone months without getting a single solitary silent phone call! Hopefully making those calls was beneficial to the caller- but the whole thing remains an unsolved mystery to me. Oh well.