Tammy

Last year, I started getting a lot of phone calls looking for "Tammy". I wasn't sure if it was some sort of scam or if there was just some elderly Tammy out there who could no longer remember her own phone number. About this time last year, she was calling around for auto insurance quotes, so I was getting 6 to 10 calls every day from people trying to sell insurance to Tammy. I think she even drove a Lincoln Town Car.

That tapered off, but I continued to get calls for Tammy from time to time. I engaged enough of the people to become convinced that it's a confused old lady situation, not scammers calling me.

Last week, one of them gave me Tammy's last name. That was enough that I tracked her down online.

It turns out that she's 10 years younger than me! Who's in their 40s and can't remember her own phone number.

This is a little bit of a detour, but a year or two ago, I was editing bad formatting and broken links on early blog posts, and there was one where I just had Shelly's cell phone number out there for anyone to read. I was probably asking the 8 billion strangers in the world to send her mean text messages. This was probably in the day where "messaging rates may apply" meant that we had to pay for some number of text messages.

The internet was such an innocent place in the 00s.

At any rate, along with other information I won't share, I do have Tammy's number now. It's the same as mine, but the 1st 2 digits and last 2 digits of the end part of the number are swapped. So if my phone number ends in 8764, hers ends in 6487. So now, if you know me well enough to have my number, you also have Tammy's number.

But don't text her, please. Unlike in the 00s, I now understand that internet people can hide behind their anonymity and be pretty gross to others. Especially when those others are women.

Still though, I don't think Tammy is very smart.