After a few hours at the mall scoring some post-holiday bargains, I went home. There was a message on the answering machine from an overseas cousin.
Sorry to miss her call, I called another cousin for her phone number. She promised to look the number up and called back a few minutes later.
I dialed. A recorded message responded with, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please call your operator.”
Naively thinking that I could resolve this with one push of a button, I punched 0 on my phone.
“Oh, no,” the operator said, “That’s an international call. That’s out of my scope. You’ll have to talk to your long-distance carrier.”
She connected me. After five recorded messages came and went, none having anything to do with the problem, I waited, thinking an operator would come on the line. Instead, the message repeated.
I punched 0 again.
“You have made an inappropriate response,” came a recorded message. “Try again.”
At that point I was ready to give them a very inappropriate response but thought better of it. I tried the regular operator again and, silly me, heard the same thing the first operator said. So I looked up the long-distance carrier in the phonebook, dialed an 800 number and was told to dial in my “wireless” phone number.
Oops again.
I went back to the phone book, tried once more, and this time got an emergency phone number.
Since I was having no luck, I tried another tactic. I telephoned the consular office of my cousin’s country–and got another recorded message: “Your call can’t go through because we’re checking on trouble for that number.”
I will now write my cousin a note that, with luck, will get there in eight days. Anyone for carrier pigeons?
