Thursday, October 11, 2007

A little internet is a dangerous thing

Yesterday morning when I came into work I had "1 missed call" on my phone, but no message. Now, I rarely get phone calls at work, and even more rarely are they from someone I don't know or am not expecting, so I was really surprised to see this random call from a number in the 709 area code. Something about the 709 area code niggled in the back of my brain all morning, and I finally was curious enough to google it to figure out where I knew 709 from. Turns out 709 is the area code for Newfoundland and Labrador, which is, of course, why it was familiar. As my mom grew up in St. John's and we still have lots of family in NL, it was not inconceivable ("I do not think it means what you think it means") that someone in the family would have tried to call my work number, so that got me curious.

So I did a reverse phone number look up on Canada411, and got two hits, both for names and addresses in St. John's. Neither name was familiar to me, so I googled them both. The first turned out to be an apparently fairly well known folk singer in St. John's (but not someone I had ever heard of). The second name was even more curious, as it appeared to be of Russian extraction, which is not all that common in St. John's, b'y. That google search turned up a bed and breakfast in downtown St. John's, run by this Russian gentleman (who I am sure is quite lovely, but is still not someone I know). I googlemapped the two addresses and they are only a few streets apart, but don't appear to have any connection.

Neither of these people would have any reason that I know of to be contacting me in my work capacity, and my number is not exactly the primary number for the library, and neither is someone I know in my personal life. So now I am more curious than ever. I know it's just a wrong number or misdialed or something equally mundane, but I'm still extremely curious.

And that, me son, is today's lesson on how sometimes the internet makes things worse. *eye roll*

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Call it!

Ps: I love reading your blog.

Serdic said...

That was my reaction too.