The Calls Are Not Coming From Inside The House

Yesterday was a wee bit strange. I woke up after having a rather bad dream. Remembering a dream is itself unusual, because I normally don't. In this dream, I was back at my old workplace, trying to get from one part of the room to the other. Boring, you say? Oh, did I mention that I was stopped every few feet by people asking me questions, so a trip across the room that should have taken seconds lasted hours? The thing is, with slight exaggeration, that used to describe a trip across the room for me. I may never get over this "don't want to deal with people" thing if I have any more dreams like that to remind me what it's like.

Roughly twelve hours later, we were struck with more weirdness in the form of a phone call. The caller ID said it was from our friend, but the voice that came out of the phone was decidedly not our friend's voice. The biggest clue was that the person on the phone was yammering on in Spanish. Our friend does not speak Spanish, and neither do we, so the sounds coming out of the phone had an even greater level of incomprehensibility than they normally would. We then tried calling her husband's cell phone, but got no answer. We tried their home phone, and got the machine. It wasn't terribly late at night, but when two out of three alternate forms of communication come up empty after the first has been compromised, one tends to worry a bit. Toss in the fact that they live somewhat close to the border, and have had incidents with illegals literally in their back yard, the worry becomes a bit more pronounced. By "pronounced" I mean that we decided to call the cops.

Yes, really. We called the cops.

Not 911, but their town's police department. They redirected me to the county sheriff's office. To both departments' credit, though, they were very good about listening to me blather on about our non-Spanish speaking friends and the mystery phone call. They also got to our friends' house reasonably quickly. They were there when our friends finally got home. They were fine, of course. She just lost her phone, and the person who found it was calling everyone in the phone's book.

None of whom speak Spanish. Unless you count my ability to count to 10 thanks to Sesame Street, but that severely limits communication in anything other than binary. Not terribly popular.

It's nice that the person who found the phone tried to contact people who knew the owner and didn't just abscond with it. However (and here's where the rant comes in), you mean to tell me that you couldn't find one friggin' person who could speak even a little English? In America?!?!?!?!? Call me racist, I don't care. America = English. Speak it. You don't have to speak it well, you don't have to write it well (we got that one covered already). Speak the damn language. Yeah yeah... "America doesn't have an official language!" My rebuttal: bite my hairy ass, it's English. American English, but it's English, dammit.

That's a mini-rant, as I could just type about this for hours on end. I just hope she gets her phone back, even though they have to find a friggin' translator to do so.