9-4-2026

Remember the days when a ringing phone meant someone cared enough to call?

The most recent indication I must be aging is my fond remembrances of the National Do Not Call Registry. Every personal phone number I have had was on that registry. Today in the era of robocalls and scammers there seems be little point. Instead, I let numbers not found in my contacts go to voicemail and let my text app filter unknown sender messages. That doesn’t work for the library.

Beginning last week Monday, the library has been inundated with robocalls every day. I reached a point that staff let suspicious calls go to the answering machine. The perception was they slowed down, but that did not last. The few I answered waited a beat or two before responding to my greeting as mass dialing calls tend to do. One in particular followed up with a female voice asking something along the lines of, “Are you there? Can you hear me now?” That was followed by a statement about my Medicare information needing updating.

I do not believe the voice belonged to a living person. The transition between greeting and task was nonexistent and needed no reaction from me. There was no inquiry into who I was and a human would have realized a public library isn’t signed up for Medicare. So, I hung up.

As a topic for this article, I have two objectives. The first is to explain why we may not be jumping to answer the phone and apologize for any missed calls or seeming rudeness if there was any. Sometimes caller ID tells us who is on the line. Usually, however, we see a location. The Medicare call I took claimed to be from Racine. Not too far away, but not exactly local either.

The second objective is to publicize the fact that these calls happen all the time. If the call had come through my personal phone and I was signed up for Medicare, it is possible I would have interacted with the caller to my own detriment.

As a general rule, I don’t give information out to people who call me. If my credit card number is stolen, and it has been stolen, I call back using the number on the back of the card or on my statement. That is the only way I know the interaction is legitimate. Breath and call back a number not provided by the caller. Meanwhile, forgive us if we send you to voice mail during open hours, which would not include Labor Day weekend.

Reading Now: Deserving of Murder by Mary Ann Noe

Listening to Now: The Portrait of a Lady Henry James