Hot Line

Right. So, I’ve been getting some serious phone action lately. Of course, I really want to call it “some sweet phone action”, but if I’m being honest, it falls way, way more into the creepy camp than the sexy one. And P.S., it’s from total strangers.

So, if I may, let me present Case #1:

I have a heavy breather at The Company. But here’s the awkward part: he’s a client. So The Breather calls up, and he’s always panting—either like he has just run a mile or is . . . how do you say in your language? . . . a couple of strokes away from the money shot. And he says who he wants to talk to, or he blurts out some kind of emergency, and then I transfer him to someone, usually with him still breathing just as hard as when I initially answered the phone. But the thing is, sometimes The Breather spends a good 20 seconds breathing before he even speaks. Count it out, people. 20 seconds is time enough for a full-fledged Extravaganza of Awkwardness when you don’t know if The Breather is going to place an order eventually, or if he’s just your garden-variety perv. And it has led to some awkward moments with co-workers, like the first time I had to ask another woman in the office, “Um . . . did I just transfer an obscene phone caller to you?”, all the while keeping my fingers crossed that please, please, little bitty baby Jesus, don’t let that guy be her husband. Here’s what happened:

Me: Welcome to The Company. How can I help you?

Him: (Panting. Really hard panting.)

Me: Ummm . . . The Company? How can I help you?

Him: (Still panting.)

Me: . . . hello . . . ?

Him: (Shouting from a distance, as if the phone is far, far away from his face.) I . . . NEED . . . MARY . . .

Me: Um . . . okay . . . um . . . one moment, I’ll get her for you . . .

Him: (Muttering under his breath, the phone suddenly very close to his face.) Maaaaary . . . niiiiice . . .

Case #2:

So this client? customer? whatever? calls up, and she’s giggling, which tips me off right away because apparently, people in industry absolutely never giggle. And she says to me, “Oh. My. God. You won’t believe it. I thought your number ended with a 5, not a 4, and I called it, and I got this phone sex line! It was this woman saying, ‘Hi, I’m Samantha, and I’m ready for some hot . . . chat . . . .’ And I didn’t know what to do!”

My number at work is one number removed from a phone sex line. And I thought it was kind of great, not only because it puts a little edge in the workday, but also because it also explained the unusually high number of hang-up calls I get. So since that revelation, I’ve been keeping track of the hang-ups, figuring, you know, they’re the dudes looking for Samantha, and I’ve had 37 so far.

But now that I’ve been counting, I’ve become offended more than anything else. 37 callers, and not one of them thinks I’m the phone sex operator?!?! Not one?!?! I mean, granted, I had to answer each call with, “Welcome to The Company. How can I help you?”, but surely one of them could have thought “The Company” was a front. One of them could have been so distracted by his, uh, immediate need that he didn’t notice the “Welcome to The Company” bit, right? Come on, don’t I have a phone-sex telephone voice?

Maybe I feel a little disappointed because to some degree, I’ve always considered a job as a phone sex operator as Plan B. Well, okay, more like Plan H, but still, it's definitely there on the Plan Alphabet.

Finally, Case #3:

And this is where I started wondering if that whole Be Careful What You Wish For business applies.

So around 3am one day, my cell phone starts ringing. I wake up just enough to think, “That’s Alejandro calling me from some strip club in Montreal.” And believe it or not, that was almost enough for me to shake myself awake and answer the phone. Alejandro has done this quite a few times before, and it has never been boring. Usually, he’ll try to shout to me over the music for a little bit, and then he’ll get distracted and pass the phone off to some stranger. And the new person chats with me and gives me a play-by-play of what the stripper dudes are doing. And while the thought of physically being in a room with naked guys on stage is almost enough to make me cry with the horrifying awkwardness of it—oddly enough, presentational public nudity, that kind of faux-sexy (read: actually the complete opposite of sexy) nakedness, makes me supremely uncomfortable from a kind of equality-based, social justice standpoint, since I tend to believe that if one person in the room is naked, then everybody should be naked—second hand narration of public nudity is actually pretty fabulous: “Okay, so, um, the fire chief seems to have concluded that something in the building has warranted some kind of fire code violation . . . right . . . oh, well, and it looks like the fire chief has decided that the violation can be remedied by taking off his pants . . .”

But I digress. That was all just to say that I thought the 3am call was just Alejandro out having himself a good time, but when I checked the Caller ID the next day, it just said UNKNOWN CALL. No number.

So at work the next day, my cell phone starts to ring. And since I’m still looking for a faculty job and my cell is the contact number on my CV, I grab it. The Caller ID says UNKNOWN CALL. No number. But I figure that maybe that isn’t too unusual, since I’m sure most of the colleges I’ve applied to are, from the standpoint of my phone, UNKNOWN. So I answer.

And there’s this man on the phone, “Hello, Lulu?” And I say, “Yes.” And he repeats, “Hello, Lulu?” even though the connection is perfectly clear. And then something happens that makes me realize that this call is Bad News.

Okay, so I think I’ve been pretty forthcoming about the patented O’Brien System of Self-Defense, of which one of the key components is:

If anyone ever says, “Don’t worry—I’m not going to hurt you”, then RUN. Because really, the only people who say “Don’t worry—I’m not going to hurt you” are actually about two seconds away from doing just that.

And pretty much right away, this man says, “Don’t worry—I’m a friend.” And in that moment, it becomes perfectly clear that anyone who says “Don’t worry—I’m a friend” is actually NOT YOUR FRIEND AT ALL. Now, I can’t exactly re-create the conversation for you, because the reconstruction of it is a little out of my depth. The man’s first language was not English, and it was also not a Romance language or a Germanic language, so his pattern of vowel substitutions and verb tenses was out of the scope of my regular dialect studies, so I’d hate to try to re-create it here and lead you astray. But here’s what he told me: He was “a friend”. He got my phone number from “a friend”. I did not know him. (And on that point, he got a little philosophical. When I asked, “Who is this?” he admitted that I do not know him, adding, “But who really knows me? I don’t really know me.” Well played, sir.) That I should not worry, that “it” would be “good”, and that “it” would not be “bad”. And he seemed to think that was worth reiterating, as he repeated it quite a few times during the short span we were on the phone.

And suddenly I knew, in that way that you just know things—like how you know when it’s time to get off the El right away, even if it’s not your stop; like how you know that this is not the right motel to sleep in, Little Miss Drives-Across-the-Country-All-Alone; like how you know that out of that little group of five kids on the corner, those two are the drug dealers; my friend Fifi calls it your Spidey Sense—I suddenly knew : this man thinks I’m a prostitute.

And the first thing I thought was, “This guy thinks I’m a prostitute?!?!”

And the second thing I thought was, “This does not bode well for my dating life.”