Last week, the biggest rain ever fell on the General Store.
The wind whipped around the corners of every home, cottage, or business, yet nothing quite measured up to the entry of Curmudgeon on this beautiful fall day when the leaves were turning (not to the perfection expected), and Old Sol shone about in a truthful Carolina blue sky.
“I have had it!” Curmudgeon cried out with enough force to fluff up the top pages (as if they were not fluffed enough already) of the pile of Asheville papers that sat next to a new display of Little Debby snacks that beckoned to all those present with a tinny voice from teeny hidden speaker that said: “I’ve got great snacks!”
“I don’t think that new display is going to work,” said Storekeep to Mrs. Storekeep. They both turned their full attention to the Curmudgeon, and asked, together: “What’s wrong today?”
“I pay,” he said, “for call-waiting, not to make one friend wait while I talk to another friend but to find out who’s calling, especially when it’s one of the three worst examples of shoddy salesmanship exhibited today. The three being: one, the deal that interest rates are going up and I’m going to be hit with more costs unless I hire the caller; and two, the chance to get such a great burglar alarm that my house will be safer than a five-foot-high one-armed bandit in the middle of a room full of kinder-gardeners; or three, ‘Don’t hang up! We’re here to send you a pre-paid call-alert remote so that when I trip over the rug in the hall, I can press a button and the ambulance will be at my front door in five minutes to take me in for medical repairs! These are offered services using AT&T equipment.”
“Too, true,” said Cityfella who had quietly entered the store and heard Curmudgeon at top roar.
“And?” asked Mrs. Storekeep.
“Do you know how many calls you are allowed to block using call-waiting? I can tell you never checked it out so I’ll tell you that a subscriber is allowed six numbers—that’s SIX NUMBERS—” speaking the last words in upper case.
“But the final indignity happened this morning when that little screen with the caller display came up with my OWN NAME!”
“Your own name,” they all said at once.
“Yep,” continued Curmudgeon, “they call it spoofing and it means that unscrupulous businesses have discovered how to rent your own phone number and program their computers to call in your name so you innocently pick up ‘cause you can’t understand what’s happening.
“And when I called the business office yesterday, I found out that the only way to block a few more numbers is to give up your land line and go digital, which I do not want to do. And, as for spoofing, the salesman said it’s getting to be a bigger and bigger problem every day!”
“So what did they recommend?” asked Storekeep.
“They told me to write to Congress and tell them what’s happening to the great American phone system. To tell those men, who are sitting around doing nothing while the country literally goes down the proverbial drain, about spoofing calls! Imagine, asking General Dolt and his team of little Dolters to enact needed legislation thus stopping phone pirates from using my own phone to call me and sell something that I don’t need.”
“Did they suggest anything else?” they asked.
“Yes, I could always change my phone number, especially since I’ve had the number we now use for close to 48 years!”
“Make Curmudge a good cup of coffee,” said Storekeep to Mrs. Storekeep, “and break open a couple of packs of Little Debbies and let’s have a communication wake, and celebrate the passing of Ma Bell.”
Which is what they all did for most of the morning.
Peter Loewer has written and illustrated more than twenty-five books on natural history over the past thirty years.