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.

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."

The Verizon tech has been here, tested things, and replaced a bit of wire.

Apparently some of the wire inside the apartment (after the dial tone gets in here) was exposed, and thus subject to being knocked loose, which appears to have happened. We now have new wire, inside a box. As a bonus, there's now a phone jack in that bedroom closet, so in theory we could have a telephone extension in the bedroom without worrying about tripping over wire.

julian_tiger seemed quite pleased with the visitor. He got a chance to play "pounce on the light from the flashlight" and an excuse to jump up on the closet doorframe and demonstrate that he still has hang time. Since he was aiming for the wires on the tech's handset, I grabbed him and put him on the bed. He didn't stay there, but he seemed to register that this was not an appropriate game.

It also transpires that the cheap little phone handset cattitude had plugged in to the line as a tester after the problem developed is dead. The cordless phone is back in place, and works (I've already made calls on it), and we should replace the other in case of power outages.