The Horns Of A Dilemma

Mrs. Hillbilly Mom is on the horns of a dilemma. OK, it's not so horny as dilemmas go. It's not going to affect HM much, one way or another. It's just an irritation, a pustule, an increasingly painful inside-the-nostril pimple that is building to a head.

Every night, make that every night that we don't tie up the phone lines with our dial-up, the phone rings. It is the same caller. Ebsco teleservi. That's what the caller ID says. The prickly Hillbilly family signed up for that Do Not Call List early and often. We don't expect to get telemarketing calls, though we do get those 'not for profit' organizations like the Sheriff's something-or-other group, which gives you a shiny gold sheriff's star to put on your bumper. Yeah. Like we want that on our car, tooling around out here in meth land. And...it's not even associated with our county sheriff's office. HH quizzes them on that every time they call, just to let them twist in the wind before he says, "If I want to donate to the sheriff's department, I'll drive down to the county courthouse and donate."

I'm not so sure it's a telemarketer or a charity begging for money. The call comes every night that the phone line is open. We make it a point not to answer odd numbers. Anybody who desires to get the Hillbillies on the phone has our cell numbers. Of course, this policy didn't help my 92-year-old granny one weekend when she had guests in town, and they wanted HH to drive them to a local winery. Too bad, so sad, Grandma. You should not have forgotten HH's cell number. We don't even get up to look at the regular phone. After the fact, if we mosey by a phone, we check the caller ID. All those political calls here lately did not improve our phone response rate.

So, the dilemma is, do we answer the phone, or continue to let it ring. It only rings 4 times, then the machine picks up. The only messages that have been left, by various voices, is, "May I speak to Hillbilly Mother?" OK. Anyone who knows me knows that I am less formal. I don't go by Hillbilly Mother. So I'm thinkin' this is somebody who has a mailing list or credit card info, because the phone and everything else are listed in HH's name. But the only people I can think of who would be so persistent are those people who work for collection agencies. Who else would take the time to call night after night? I seriously doubt that it's a Nigerian wanting to help me collect my $3 million lottery prize.

The puzzler is why they ask for ME. I do not owe anybody. HH does not owe anybody. The boys are too young to owe anybody. I'm thinkin' that if this is about collections, then it's for one of the wayward Hillbillies to whom we 'loaned' $1000 last month. Then again, we got an actual call from a collection agency, and they flatly stated that the call was an attempt to collect a debt, and they left a number to return the call. Which I didn't because I'm not somebody's private investigator, tracking down their debtors that they never should have given credit to in the first place. And you can bet our 'borrower' is going to get an earful about giving out our phone number, because if this becomes a habit, I WILL rat him out.

So I got to researching the innernets, and it looks like this EBSCO Teleservices is some kind of scammer, and I really don't think I will answer, even though curiosity is nigh to causing this cat to expire.

Perhaps I can just pick up the phone, lay it down for an hour or so, and HH can walk by and fart.