Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Names will Always Hurt Me

Somehow, I think someone hacked my land-line phone-bill preferences. I know I'm behind the times by still having a land line, but I tried the voip thing and it just didn't work out. You couldn't dial out half the time and I didn't feel so good about leaving my kids home alone without a working phone. What if someone hurt themselves and they couldn't dial 911? What if someone needed stitches? (That happens a lot at our house.) What if they were scared and needed to talk to their mommy? (The boys would never cop to that one, but it happens.) I didn't want Division of Child and Family Services banging on my door and accusing me of neglect issues. I have enough issues without involving the government.

When I signed up for a land line again I had the company send me my bill via email. One less paper for me to send to the recycling bin! I got my first bill a little later and it said "Dear Idiot Phone." I couldn't figure out who was sending me this email! It couldn't be the phone company because that wouldn't be very good customer service to call their customer an "Idiot!" I opened the email, for sure it was some phishing thing, but it wasn't. It was legit.

After several months of getting phone bills addressed to "Dear Idiot Phone" I started to get a little offended. I really don't need computers or someone who doesn't-know-me-from-Adam calling me names; I have enough self-confidence problems without them adding to the list. I finally got on today to check how this name-calling came to be. Somehow, someone had edited my Greeting to "Idiot." I know I didn't do this, although now that I think about it, in retrospect I may have; it was late at night and the phone company was giving me grief when I re-signed up with them. I may have been pretty irritated and thought it meant a greeting for them, not me. Actually, that makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. I'm pretty sure that's what I did. You know, talking things over in my head really helps me straighten things out.

Tonight I changed the greeting when I discovered I had that option. I changed it to "Not-an-Idiot."