Tag: phone

Robocalls

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I’m in the bathroom, the phone rings and my wife is out picking up grandchildren from school. I open the door, run across the bedroom and grab the phone and blurt out, “Hello”? A voice answers, “This is Linda with Master Card/Discover credit card services …”

I’m driving in my car and my phone rings. I think it might be important so I pull over and find my phone. I press answer and hold it to my ear, “Hello?” I say. “Hi, this is Tony” says the voice on the other end, “with an important message about your credit …”

I’m in my recliner taking a nap when I am jarred awake by my phone ringing. The number on my caller I.D. is a local exchange so I figure it’s someone I know. I don’t recognize the number but I haven’t memorized everyone’s phone number. I say hello and a voice on the other end states “This is the IRS. You have a judgment against you, and you have three days to reply or face penalties or possibly imprisonment …”

Welcome to 2019. With number spoofing, the phone is now a weapon of deception. A study by the Federal Communications Commission projects that almost half of the cell calls that will be received this year are going to be spam. These junk calls with their uninvited robot-voices are designed to get your money or information. The governments “do not call list” isn’t helping. There is no reason to tell them not to call again either. They just spoof another number and call again.

It has gotten so bad that I carry both my cell phone and my cordless phone with me when I am home. I have to do this because the provider of my chemo drug will call me to schedule my monthly delivery and I don’t want to miss their call.

Just how did it come to this? Time was, a ringing phone indicated that someone I knew wanted to talk with me. Why else would they have my phone number? Sure I got a few prank phone calls, with a last name like Rug I expected them, but I didn’t get them very often.

Today though, it’s not even a person calling you anymore. It’s a computer program that can dial hundreds of people an hour. I am constantly called by telemarketers, credit card people, and political campaigns. They all combine to annoy me with unwanted calls and that doesn’t include all the scams, frauds and illegal schemes that stay just one step ahead of the overworked regulation agencies.

This field has grown so much that the scam artists can now create a spoofed number that looks like someone you might know or impersonates a business person that you might know.

According to a CNN article, “A scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller, saying they’ve found suspicious activity on your account. You’re then tricked into ‘confirming’ your mother’s maiden name, your address, your card number and PIN number.”

This is terrific, one more thing for me to worry about besides stolen passwords, identity theft, and credit card fraud and fake news.

I signed up for the “Do Not Call Registry” and thought that this would stop these calls. Silly me. The Do Not Call Registry is a big joke today, useless against robocalls and offshore individuals that laugh at this attempt to reduce the “garbage calls” as we call them. While writing this article I received three robocalls that interrupted me.

An FCC report stated that progress was being made but another report indicated that robocalls were up 57 percent in 2018 from 2017. An increase of 57 percent doesn’t sound like much progress to me.

The FCC is now requiring that the phone companies implement a technology called SHAKEN/STIR. This makes sure that the number you see on your phone is a real number and not a “spoofed” one.  I am sure that by the time this technology is put into service by the phone carriers that there will be a new scam. I know from my days picking locks and hacking that anything that was built by a man can be defeated by a man.

All of this has made people disregard phone calls altogether, checking the display, frowning in disgust and refusing to answer. This is not a great solution though. Say, you’re on your way home after work. It’s a Friday night and your cell phone rings. You look at the number and it doesn’t look like anyone you know so you press ignore.

The next day, your best friend calls. “Hey, you won’t believe this. Someone gave me four court side tickets to the game last night. I tried calling you on Bill’s phone, but you didn’t answer. It was awesome! Sorry you missed it.”

Alexander Graham Bell is in heaven looking at this and thinking, “What the heck happened?” And then, his heavenly phone rings and he hears a voice that says, “This is the IRS. We are calling to inform you that an arrest warrant has been issued in your name …”

Norb is an independent journalist from Lockport. Previously published in the Niagara Gazette.

Milkbone, Buffalo

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For 10 years of my life I worked at Milkbone in Buffalo where I was a maintenance man on the packing floor. A large part of my day was spent sitting around waiting for a break down. I didn’t have a lot to do most of the time and as they say “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” The guys I worked with and I would come up with creative ways to prank the rest of the employees.

One day I super glued a quarter to the floor in front of the coffee machine. We all then sat at “our” table and watched. People would see it and look around to see if anyone was watching them. They would then try to pick it up. One guy even tried to kick it with his heel. They knew they had been had when they would hear us all laughing. This was good for a full day of laughs for only a quarter.

Another time I caught a bull frog on my way home. The following day I brought it to work in an old lunch box. At dinner time the plant nurse was fixing her meal in the lunch room. Right next to her was a microwave oven. I took the lunch box to the counter and purchased a buttered bulky roll from a vending machine. I opened the roll and slapped the frog inside.

The frog wasn’t very pleased about this and was kicking like mad. I turned to the nurse and asked if she knew how to operate the microwave and she said she did. I said great and pulled out the roll with the frog in it and asked her what you did with the legs. I don’t think she ate dinner that night.

Speaking of legs, another prank we pulled involved a false pair of legs that I built, complete with pants and shoes. We would put this sticking out from under a pallet of product and watch people’s expression as they came around the corner and saw the legs hanging out. The results were hilarious. This pair of legs would disappear and reappear periodically.

I don’t know who was doing this but I suspect multiple people. One of the next times “the legs” appeared was during a health inspection. They were stashed behind a shelving unit in my shop when the health inspector and the plant manager spotted them. The manager yelled at the legs, kicked them and finally grabbed them and pulled them out. We were called to the office where we all denied any knowledge of the legs.

The legs were confiscated but they were easy to duplicate and I made another pair that week. We placed them around until the bottom of a flour silo fell open. It dumped the entire contents on the floor, something like 50,000 pounds of flour. A buddy of mine took the legs and buried them deep in the pile of flour. Several days later while they were shoveling up the mess the legs popped out. The person doing the shoveling took one look, walked out the door and went home without punching out.

I had the ability to lock the men’s room door that had an inside bolt from the outside using a bit of string. People could smoke in the men’s room at the time. A man was leaning on the window sill enjoying a cigarette when I locked the door. We then ran upstairs and got a piece of conduit to tap on the window above his head. This is where the story went south.

My buddy Jerry hit the glass too hard causing two small holes in it. The smoker hit the ground and crawled over to the door to find it locked. Quite some time later he told us he thought he was being set up because he was fooling around with a married woman and he thought her husband had locked the door and was  at him.

When I was building my tool cart, we got a call that a packaging machine was malfunctioning. My buddy Joe, picked up his tool pouch, got into my cart and I locked the doors. I wheeled it over to the broken down machine and listened to the operator explain the problem. At that point I unlocked my tool cart and let Joe out. He then repaired the problem. When he was done, he climbed back into my cart and I closed and locked the door. Then I proceeded to wheel him back into the shop.

I think the best prank I perpetrated was on my last day working there. Over the 10 years working there I managed to figure out how to get into every room and office in the place including all the front offices. I also knew the security guard’s routine and where he would be at any given time. This allowed me to dodge the guard.

They had this newfangled electronic phone system just installed and I managed to get ahold of an operating manual. This system had the capability of forwarding calls from one phone to another by punching in a three digit code. I programmed the phones to forward all calls to the plant manager’s office. I never heard anything about this but I can imagine the havoc this caused because every phone had to be reprogrammed. I can’t remember all the practical jokes I pulled while I was there this is just a few of them.

Like Luca Fortunato an electrician at Nabisco used to say, “At least we laugh.”