A Little Scare

(Note: My oldest sister's pseudonym on this blog is "Texas". So when I talk about "Texas", I'm talking about my sister, not the state.)


My sister, Texas, accidentally left her phone off the hook.

For FOUR DAYS.

I got an e-mail from her friend Mo, who lives in North Carolina, yesterday afternoon. Mo explained that she had been trying to call Texas since Sunday and kept getting a busy signal. She wanted to know if I had the phone numbers of any of Texas's local friends, so that someone could go and check on her. (I live in upstate New York and Texas lives in, well, Texas; it's not like I could just pop over to her place.) She had an e-mail address of one friend of Texas's, but she didn't know how close that person lived.

I didn't have any of Texas's friends' phone numbers, so Mo said she'd try the e-mail address that she had. In the meantime, I had the phone company test Texas's line; the test showed that a phone was off the hook. Which was not particularly reassuring; who leaves a phone off the hook for FOUR DAYS?

I went online, did a reverse address search, and got the names and phone numbers of some of Texas's neighbors. Then I got the number for the local PD, just in case.

Mo e-mailed back right before I left work and said if she didn't hear from her e-mail contact in a couple of hours, she'd give me a call at home and we'd go from there.

Right after I got home last night, the phone rang. It was Texas.

It turns out that Mo's e-mail contact actually lived over an hour away from Texas. But! She had e-mail addresses for some of Texas's golfing buddies, so she e-mailed them and one of them went over to check on Texas and tell her to put her damn phone back on the hook, for Chrissakes!

All's well that ends well. But, Texas? Buy a new phone. Please.