IT WAS A SCAM!!

Well, at least now that’s what T thinks. Late last night, after I had gone to bed, he got a call on his cell phone. He was sleeping on the sofa in the den with the cat, as she will not last too much longer and he wants to be with her in these last days. Consequently I never heard the phone ring nor did I hear him get up to answer it so I didn’t find this out until he woke up this morning. T recognized the voice on the phone as someone who has tried to scam him before.

(side note: let me add that ministers get scammed a lot. it has to do with two main reasons. one, we are trained to believe you. basically, your minister and your mama are the last two people on the planet who will still believe you against all odds. we believe people. it’s part of our job. two, we help people. we give. in a myriad of small ways. I can’t even count the number of times either T or I have taken someone to the store or given a gas card to someone or gotten them some groceries or given someone a ride or taken them to a doctor’s appointment. We ARE social services for the public. Sure we work with urban ministries and cooperative ministries. Yes, we have benevolence funds. But we also just help people. in any way we can. We may be jaded and cynical, but most of us would rather be “taken” than to let one of God’s children go hungry or be hurt.)

That said, after you’ve have been in the ministry a while, you do get cautious and suspicious sometimes. Anyway, when his cell phone rang last night, T listened to this guy’s story about being the couple that visited X Church (he got it wrong, too, which is kind of funny) and how his wife was stranded somewhere or something. T asked right away, how did you get this number?” Click. The guy had hung up the phone. Damn. All that terror and frustration and fear on my part yesterday. All for a scam. Just so this guy could get T’s cell phone number. He waited, biding his time, until late at night, hoping to get T at a moment when he couldn’t contact anyone else and would just willingly help this guy. Although, like T says, he’s not a good scammer at all. He actually sucks at it. He’s tried at least once before to get T to help him out by pretending to be another minister (word to the wise: ministers know one another. we do talk to each other. especially in small towns) that T had never heard of.

I’m pissed. But not much. It was a horrid way to spend Valentine’s Day — thinking that everybody you loved was dead at one point or another. Yes, I’d like to punch him one good time in the gut. But over all, I’m done with it. I’m still reeling from all the thoughts and feelings I had yesterday, but I’m not generally one for revenge. I would love to see him punished, but hell, we don’t even know really who he is, so that won’t really ever happen. oh well. Life will go on.

I am making a little credit card sized card for T’s mother to carry in her wallet that says “In Case of Emergency” and lists the names and pertinent numbers for all her children. I’m going to laminate it (love having that Xyron) and send it to her. I’ll probably do the same thing for each of my parents. Also, T’s office is going to make a list of all their spouses and spouses’ work numbers so that should something happen to them, someone else in the office knows how to get in touch with the spouse. I think we’re also going to change cell phones and get new numbers. We haven’t gotten new numbers since we moved and our phones are still based one area code away. It’s time to get hooked into a new cell phone contract and upgrade our phones anyway. Might as well get locally-based cell phone numbers while we’re at it.

through the wringer

Right after noon today, as E and I were just getting in the house from the MOMS Club Valentine’s Day Party, I got a phone call from church. It was T’s secretary. A sheriff’s deputy had called the church looking for him to tell him that a member of his family had been in an accident. The secretary had given the person T’s cell phone, and then she called me. I tried to call T, who was out of town in a hugely important meeting, but he wasn’t answering his phone. I didn’t expect him to as he was the one chairing this meeting he was attending. I found the phone number for the church where he was and talked to the secretary there. She agreed to interrupt his meeting and get him out for me. He hadn’t heard a thing, but he promised to keep his cell phone on since this person was supposed to call him. I then started trying to reach members of his family. I got his oldest sister first and was relieved. She and I both figured it could be their mom, as she is older and isn’t the safest driver any more and was involved in a wreck just before Christmas. We divided up and she said she’d call their other sister and I’d try to reach their mom. I didn’t get an answer at her cell phone or at her house. T’s oldest sister couldn’t reach their other sister either. We said we’d keep trying and hung up with each other.

I called T back to give him the update. He had been able to talk to his secretary and from what he said I now thought (as did he) that it was a sheriff’s deputy who came to the church office looking for T. He also only identified T by the first part of his last name (which is my maiden name). We both wondered if instead of T’s family, it was really a member of my family that we needed to be worried about. I quickly called my sister. “Thank God you’re alive” is how I responded when she picked up at work. I filled her in. She agreed to call our grandmother and I was going to call our parents. I got my dad on the phone but my mom was out to lunch with a friend in the next town over. My sister texted me to let me know that Grandma was okay. I filled daddy in some more (actually I had called him earlier when I couldn’t get in touch with anyone to ask him to pray for T’s mom because I thought it was her). Daddy couldn’t get in touch with Mama. I couldn’t get her either. I was starting to really panic. Daddy was ready to get in the car and start driving around to look for her. I told him I needed him to stay home and be at the phone (besides, I really didn’t want to be worried about my distraught father driving around town). My sister and I spent the next half hour to 45 minutes trying to find our mother. She found out where Mama was to be having lunch while I called two of the local hospitals. My sister called a third hospital. She wasn’t in the restaurant, but she wasn’t a patient at any hospital either. Looking back I should have made more connections. And to be honest, I was asking some questions as we went along, like why would Mama have T’s work number in her personal things? and do either of his sisters even know what church he serve? Finally I got Mama to answer her cell phone. “Oh my God you’re alive!” I screamed when she picked up the phone. “Was there some question about that?” she asked. “Don’t move,” I shouted at her. “I’ll call you right back.” I immediately called my father to tell him she was okay. Then I called my sister. Then I called my mother back and explained everything to her. So. all of my family was now accounted for. In the meanwhile I had talked to T’s oldest sister and she had reached her mom. But we still hadn’t found his middle sister. Her cell phone was off, as she doesn’t keep it on at work. Her husband has recently changed jobs and none of us knew the name of his new accounting firm. I did some searching online and found it. I got his voicemail and left him a message. Then I wound up calling back and explaining the situation (it was complicated, yeah, he’s my brother-in-law; he’s married to my husband’s sister) to the firm’s very new secretary who was so new she didn’t even know who he was yet. She could tell he had not come in today, though, because he had a remote location meeting with a client. She promised to help me track him down. Eventually my brother-in-law called me and I was able to establish that his wife was okay. He hadn’t heard anything, and we figured that he’d hear something before T would anyway. Finally, nearly 3 hours after the first call from T’s secretary, I knew where everybody was. I had forgotten to feed me and E, who had managed to crawl up on the kitchen counter and steal/eat all his sister’s Valentine’s Day candy while I was on the phone. I had not managed to get him down for a nap at his regular naptime, but I had gotten him to go to sleep shortly after K got home. Oh speaking of K, at some point in the whole ordeal T and I realized that K might have been in some kind of accident at school and that they were calling T’s number first so I had called the school and had them check on her. I was seriously upset by then.

I dealt with all of this while
a) T was out of town (he’s been gone since Tuesday, although he’s back home tonight) and
b) on very little sleep (I woke up at midnight last night when one of the children cried out and then I was awake until after 3. E got me up at 5:35 this morning) and
c) on little food as I hadn’t fixed lunch until I realized it was after 1and I was hungry.

Once I had contacted everybody, and while E was still asleep, I put K in front of the TV and took a nap. I slept for more than an hour — until K actually came to wake me up.

I’ve “lost” every member of my family today. At some point I thought every single one of them was dead. I’m shot, emotionally spent, really frazzled. I managed to talk to everyone I’m related to today in the span of a few of hours, which was a good thing overall. Quite frankly, I’m glad I know how to get in touch with them. During the time when I didn’t know if the reason I couldn’t get an answer on the phone meant that someone was injured or dead, I was a wreck. But when I heard their voices, the first thing I always said was, “thank God you’re alive.” It was a huge sense of relief to hear from everyone eventually.

T talked to the sheriff’s department eventually, but only from him calling them. We began to think this was a prank as they had no record of anything. But they also said they didn’t operate the way that we described (about someone calling or visiting a location to tell a family member of a relative’s accident), and that they would have called our local police department to have them contact him. When T called our local police just to alert them to a possible prank, they didn’t think it was a prank at all, but rather a case of mistaken identity. They said an officer was probably trying to reach someone and realized after contacting the church that T was not the one they really needed. They probably just continued to pursue the person they really wanted, not bothering to re-contact the church to say they’d made a mistake.

In either case, I have been through the wringer today. I’ve had enough drama and stress to last me several lifetimes. “How many years do you think you’ve shaved off your life today?” my sister asked me. “I don’t know,” I responded, “but I’m pretty sure I’m going to wake up with a lot more gray hair in the morning.”