Tech Nightmare
The New Owner of My Old Work Phone Playing Ugly Games
Pretending to be me when friends mistakenly get in touch
I’m scrolling through emails when my friend’s name appears at the top of my screen. “Jenna,” she writes, “What’s going on? We have two text lines for you and are getting bizarre messages on the other one.”
“I sent only one message today at 9:36 a. m.,” I respond. I am in New York, visiting family and friends, and had made a date with my friend and her husband. I was really looking forward to seeing them but had to cancel after being slammed with a punishing case of laryngitis.
“I sent you a message after we spoke on the phone saying that we were sorry we missed you, and how we looked forward to seeing you again,” my friend continues. “That was on the other Jenna text or appeared to be — it had your photo.”
My heart sinks as I begin to realize what my friend is saying.
“Then ‘you’ replied, “Me too,” followed by “Just kidding. I hate you.” My friend thought I was joking, so she replied with a crying emoji to let me know she understood I was goofing around.
In fact, my friend is encountering an unwilling doppelganger who inherited my phone number, likely a few months after I gave up my office mobile after being laid off. I had sent messages to all my friends about my cell number changing, but knowing that not everyone reads every email, it makes sense that some would hold onto my old number for a while.
This past summer, my friend Rob encountered the new owner of my former work line while texting me. Rob received what he called “a very sarcastic (though funny) reply.” I can’t remember the exact words my friend read to me, but it sounded like the person writing it was pretending to be kind at first and then turning on Rob in a deliberately dark way.
I didn’t find it funny at all.
I decided it was either a disgruntled new employee who didn’t like fielding calls for me or someone else (an unhappy teenager who was mad at his or her parents)? I told Rob to delete the number and made sure he had my new phone line — and that, I thought, would be that.
I hadn’t counted on yet another friend bumping her head on this doppelganger (or should I be saying demon/demonette?) Shortly after he or she writes, “I hate you,” my friend begins seeing furious messages, one on top of the other:
· “How dare you!
· I’m just in shock that you’d think you could get away with it. You know what I’m talking about.
· Don’t lie.”
My friend sends me a screen shot of these messages, and the weird thing about all of them is my name and picture are attached. Perhaps this was an old “residue” of my work line phone, but I had erased everything I possibly could the day I left the office. I had also asked the techs at my old workplace to be sure the phone was wiped clean as well.
Soon after seeing these messages, the new owner of the phone sends a photo of a middle finger raised in the air and the F-word with the number 4385 next to it. My friend sends me a screenshot.
Lovely.
We text a bit more and I make sure my friend has my new phone number. I apologize for the situation, but she points out that it wasn’t me — it was someone impersonating me — and likely a very ugly person.
We hang up, promising to call each other soon, but I can’t help but feel this episode has smeared up a conversation with old friends who I don’t get to see very often. The idea that this new owner is reaching into my life and saying nasty things to people he or she doesn’t even know feels violating, to say the least. Especially because he/she/it is pretending to be me when sending these messages.
I decide to write to the IT director at my former office and discover that no new employees received my old phone number. Instead, the number was released to Verizon and found its way into a very unhappy person’s life.
I am trying to figure out why this person can’t simply explain I am no longer using this phone line to anyone who is looking for me. Would that be so hard? Of course, it wouldn’t, but the new owner seems to need to mess with people and I have provided a convenient way of doing that.
I guess it would be funny if it was a movie or the start of a novel. I could take it any number of ways, but I don’t want to take it anywhere that has anything to do with my life as I’m living it. As a playwright and writer, I prefer my drama on the page or the stage. I don’t want or need to get into crazy games with someone I never met and never will.
Part of me is also furious that this person is having so much fun impersonating me in the ugliest possible way. And part of me feels like an unwilling character in an episode of Black Mirror — a victim of yet another tech nightmare, trying to turn the page, but being slammed by it again and again.
My husband likes to joke that in the “old days,” phones were attached to the wall, and you always knew where they were. Not only was there no way of losing them, there was no way of creating scenarios where someone could pretend to be you and say and do things that embarrassed you.
How did we get here? Why do we stay?
I don’t know if I love my phone, but I’m certainly addicted to it. I want and need to be able to use it for getting in touch quickly with friends, finding directions, reading headlines, taking photos, applying for jobs and much, much more.
Would I give it up, though, if I could figure out how to do that?
I would, at least at this moment. I also hope I never have to deal with a situation like this again, and that no one I know ever calls the demon owner who took over my previous phone again.
Whether or not they do, I realize I need to get out of this angry space — which is why I’m sharing this story with you. It occurs to me that the new owner is sending invitations to my friends to be crazy with him or her. I’m at least happy to see my friends are not providing much bait.
Another thing that occurs to me is that when you leave something you’ve been connected to for years, like a job or relationship, there is always the risk of a bad wind blowing — the dust of your past coming to nip at your heels before you close the door and head for the future.
The job I held was great for many years — and then, for a variety of reasons, it was not. It may be the new owner of my old work line is in some way a symbol of the reasons I had to leave the old job. Perhaps he or she is like a door that is trying to close on my finger — unless I hurry to get out.
If that’s true, it means it’s past time to move away from my old life and most of all, my old phone. Because the one thing I don’t need is to play games with people.
Which is why I’m not going to try to get in touch with the person responding to my friends as me. The less air I blow into this balloon, the better. Not only in my personal life, but in my work life, too.
Move on, says the voice inside my head, yet again. It’s not where you should be any more.
Move on.
