It's midnight, or three a.m., or half past the armpit of the night. LATE, is what I mean. Or early. Certainly not any time you'd expect to have your sleep interrupted by a ringing telephone.
Yet there it is, ringing, jolting you up and out of sleep. Long distance. The call display shows...nothing beyond "Long distance". Or "Name and number unavailable". Sometimes "Private number". The first few times this happened, the display read "thunderking_96".
If you actually pick up the phone--something that rarely happens in this house--you'll hear a babbling cacophony that qualifies as a kind of aural art. Or would, if you weren't so bleary-eyed and pissed off.
The typical "message" lasts between ten and thirty seconds and has at least six discernable tracks. Three of them are answering machine outgoing messages. The other three, or six, or ten, are people yakking away about everything and nothing in particular, interspersed with every noise you hear through a telephone receiver: the buzz of a ringing phone, a quick hit of a fast busy signal, the operator imploring you to "please hang up and try your call again", and the sound of numbers on the telephone keypad being depressed. Once it sounded as if all of them were being pounded on at once. Heard dispassionately (the next morning), it can sound kind of eerie. As if "Private number" belongs to "My Name is Legion".
I've tried Googling 'thunderking_96' and various other things, to no avail. I'm beginning to think our number's being singled out for special, twice-weekly treatment. And never at any hour you'd call civilized.
When I was a kid (the 36-year-old wheezed), if the phone rang anytime much after nine at night, it meant somebody had died. We still leave our phone on at night, against that very eventuality. But thunderking_96 is starting to give me second thoughts.
I'd really love to know who's behind this. Is this happening to any of you, and if so, have you had any luck figuring out where the hell these voices of Hell are coming from?
4 comments:
We gave up land line home phone a few years ago. Never heard of Thunderking
It's getting worse. We had *four* calls last night and one at 6:50 this morning.
Oh, and we *can't* give up our landline: our smoke detector is linked to the phone, so the fire department is automatically notified when it goes off. Saves on insurace and gives peace of mind. That won't work with a cell.
THUNDERKING?
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