Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Personal phone protocol stipulates that if I don’t recognize your phone number, I sure as shit ain’t pickin’ up. Heck, even if I do recognize your number, I may still not answer. Same goes for any knocks on the front door, where surprise visits will be summarily ignored. This has been my unilateral policy, and it’s served me well. I chose to break custom tonight, however, and I was duly punished for it.

There’s been an uptick of calls from a few unfamiliar numbers recently from a very familiar area code: 847, Illinois, home of the alma mater. At first, I wrote it off as an incompetent telemarketer, but I didn’t count on an incompetent and persistent telemarketer, so I answered today out of curiosity. An earnest, fresh-faced voice greeted me on the other end. Name of Chase, graduated a couple years after me, and he was calling for a few reasons. But first, he wanted to know how I was doing.

Then, he began reciting my current address, contact info, employer, job title, all in an easygoing, conversational tone, which annoyed me to the utmost. That’s because I knew precisely where this call was headed–an effort to dial for alumni dollars. Thing is, though, the punchline was still far off in the distance, and the road to it was fraught with topics such as what my degree truly meant to me.

I politely aborted the call, logged into the database to delete all my personal info, and promptly went ghost. In my mind, I had somehow concluded that by serving time in the local alumni association–a certifiably wretched experience, but that’s for another day–I was insulating myself from such calls. Erroneous! Erroneous on all counts. Yeah, a university might be an institution charged with the high-minded pursuit of truth. But it is also a creature that H.P. Lovecraft could only have conceived in his happier moments, one which will consume every minute, every dollar in your possession, if you let it. Lesson learned, you could say.