Craziness

I'm sitting here at work listening to the phone ring off of the hook. Non-stop. This is crazy. It would be wonderful if it were customers calling to place orders for stairs (do you need any stairs? LOL). But no, these are crank calls from Brazil. Or at least they *say* they are calling from Brazil. So far today we've had over 80. It is only 1 pm. We had 84 voice mail messages last night on the company overnight answering system. Of the 84, 82 were crank calls - two were actual customers. We can't ignore the batches of messages or the ringing phones because you never know when one will be a real customer.

Some of the calls are just hang-ups, some you hear giggling in the background, and for some they talk. The talking (sometimes in Spanish or Portuguese, sometimes in English) is anywhere from "I speak English. I from Brazil. I play soccer every day." to vulgar comments. AT&T has not been much help. I know that there are computer records of the origin and destination of every single phone call going through their system. We are keeping a list of every single call, with the time. It is almost turning in to a full time job for the receptionist who has a lot of other things to do.

I just don't GET IT! WHY? This is not a single day occurrence. This is happening every day and has been for 3 weeks now. Weekends too (last Monday we had over 200 voice mail messages from the weekend - with ONE from a customer). What is the fascination? Why would someone waste so much time on this? One of the worst things is that this is on our nickel. They are calling in to an 800#. Hopefully this will be resolved soon. Until then I just wanted to take a minute to SSSCCCRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAMMM!!! AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!

Ok, I feel better ... vent over. :)