Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Massachusetts is trying to trace the contacts of people who have tested positive for th coronavirus. There's a problem: a lot of people are ignoring the calls, because a lot of people don't answer calls from phone numbers they don't know.

Those calls should be identified as from "MA COVID Team", but right now that only works if the recipient is paying for caller ID. They have arranged that all the contact tracing calls come from numbers with an 833 or 857 prefix, and they're asking people in Massachusetts to answer unknown-number calls while we're dealing with the pandemic.

As far as I know, right now this is something only Massachusetts is doing, so relevant for people who either live in Massachusetts, or have been here recently.

minnehaha K posted last week [1], unhappy about the trend for con committees to sit behind email like chair@example.org and artshow@example.org with no name given.

A flyer for Lunacon turned up in the mail today. Two people working on the convention are identified: the Filk Mistress and the Regency Dance Master. Not, say, the chair, or the people running the dealers' room, art show, or registration.

The only reason I'm confident that there is a con chair is that she, he, it, or they takes credit for creating the convention flyer.

cattitude is poking around online as I write this, and reports that most of the articles on the website are credited to "chair" (still unnamed).

[1] Thanks for reminding me of who, fredcritter.

I've gotten three wrong number calls today.

This isn't a case of someone giving out our number for no apparent reason, as happened some years ago, giving us a lot of mostly Spanish-language calls for a stranger for a few weeks. Each of these callers was looking for someone different. The first person wanted me to be Patricia McManus, and to tell me about elder care. The second said she was calling from the American Red Cross to talk to Ella Kanner. The third, just now, dove right in with a chatty "hi, how are you?" and when I asked who she was, identified herself as Lynn and kept going. It turned out she was looking for a woman named Judy, who has this phone number in area code 219, which is Indiana. She was chatty enough about it being a wrong number and she guessed she'd just hang up and dial again and… that I resorted to hanging up without letting her finish the apologies.

My voice recognition yesterday was poor enough that I didn't recognize either cattitude's mother nor one of his close friends, so with the third one it seemed possible that she was in fact calling to talk to us.

Fortunately, all these calls were from sensible people: none of them dealt with the problem of a wrong number by pressing "redial."

I know that I'm missing at least some email that I should have received in the last couple of days (I know it exists, because of cc's and the like, but it hasn't reached me). I don't know what the cause of the problem is, although the forwarding from redbird.org to panix appears functional, and I just successfully downloaded a test message I sent from gmail to the redbird address.

If you've sent me something that's gone unanswered in the last few days, please try again. (I realize that posting here won't reach anyone, but it seems better than nothing.) I would suggest phoning, except we're waiting for a repair person for the landline and my mobile reception is sad. I'll try to remember to check gmail for the time being (my username there is v [dot] rosenzweig).

[I'm also going to try actually looking at this entry for comments, rather than assuming they'll be emailed to me.]