Sonnet Challenge #38

I decided to spent some of my new free time to call people I haven’t seen in a while, or have stopped seeing in the course of life because of the social distancing.  I also decided to use the time for some more poetry.  On Sunday afternoon I sat down to write a poem but didn’t find any inspiration, so I decided to call someone.  I got voicemail.  So I called someone else.  Ditto.  Eight voicemails later, I had my inspiration.

Voicemail

A quiet day with little going on,
in Covid times the schedule is quite bare.
I miss my friends, hope they have not become
statistics with what’s going on out there.
I guess they also won’t have much to do
so thought I’d be the one that would reach out,
pick up the phone and say “Hey, how are you?”
not leave our friendship’s worth to me in doubt.
But all I got was voicemails! Every one!
Had I missed out on something? Checked the news…
there’s really nothing different going on!
I guess just me that’s sat here with the blues.
They’ll all call back at once, that’s what they’ll do
And get my outgoing voicemail message too!

[stunned silence]….[dial tone]

I guess we all have heard about these scam phone calls from people who claim to be your friends from Microsoft, talk you through helpfully giving them free access to your computer and all the personal files on it.  Quite scary for the uninitiated.  But I think my answers are worth a share.  (Of course if real Microsoft tech support people really do* need to call you back about a problem, they’ll know your ‘ticket’/problem number, and you’ll be expecting them anyway.)

Usually the house phone is Unplugged unless I need to make a call, because of cold call tele-salespeople, survey takers and scammers.  However after a recent rainstorm the phone was having problems so was Plugged In so Frontier could contact me to coordinate fixing it, leaving me vulnerable.

[ring]

Me: Hi

Scammer: Hi… is this Jeni?  Jeni Bate?

Me: Yes.

Scammer: Hi Jeni, this is Linda from Microsoft.  About your computer….

Me: (thinks: oh, really? Your accent doesn’t match your name, Linda.)

Good answer: 

Me: Oh, Hi.  Which ticket number are you calling about? I have three tickets open with you.  Which one are you calling about?

[long silence]….[dial tone].

Better answer:

Me: Oh cool, you’ve fixed it?  Can I come pick it up?

Best answer:

Me: Oh wow, have you tracked it’s location?  Have you informed the police?