The story of Paul

I met Paul when I was working selling boat tickets years ago. He was given a hard time by other staffers, so I immediately liked him. He was an oddball, and I thought that was cool. I became his friend.

However, our friendship was plagued with frustrations. We’d plan to go out for a beer, and he wouldn’t show up. I would call up his house; his parents would tell me he had forgotten that he was working at McDonald’s. When Paul would eventually meet me, he would invent tales of what happened. His maternal grandmother died more than once. He would lie to me time after time – only to be caught in it. On the times he would show up, he was always 15-30 minutes late. Always.

Sometimes during our outings would claim to go to the bathroom – only to disappear for half an hour. He would never apologize or say anything about it. He always wanted me to spend 1.5 hours busing to his home or a pub minutes from his house, rather than meeting half-way somewhere. This despite the fact that he had access to a car, while I did not. By car, the trek was only 15-20 minutes.

By the end, I just didn’t have it in me to continue the friendship. So I stopped answering his calls. And that’s when it started. At first, he would call me from his home. Almost every day. Realizing that I was screening his calls, he would call me from the McDonald’s he works at. He’s 25 now, has a double degree, but lives with his parents and works at McDonald’s.

So I get it – he’s got other issues. But nonetheless, I had had enough. Suddenly, the calls stopped. But at the same time, I started getting calls from an unknown number. The person would stay on the line, usually for 8-10 seconds and then hang up. I got especially pissed off when the person called at 3AM. I always suspected it was Paul, but I couldn’t confirm it. He never spoke a word.

Finally today, I was looking through my phone records with WIND Mobile. They had switched their billing from showing the Caller ID, which was being shown as “Unknown”, to the ANI, the Caller ID-like service telephone companies use for billing purposes. Unlike Caller ID, ANI cannot be blocked. So I finally got to see who was calling me all these times.

It was Paul. He was blocking outbound Caller ID all this time, probably by pressing *67 before making the calls to me. The display on my phone didn’t show the number for him, but my billing record does.

For your pleasure, here’s the logs from the last month. Keep in mind, this has been going on for months. I called WIND Mobile, but they said the only thing I could do was to change my number. I’ll have to call Paul, and tell him to stop. If that fails, I’ll have to switch numbers.

The Phone Calls from Paul:

Call log updated on September 14th.