Prank Caller Update

Some of you already know, some of you may not. I honestly can't remember who I told. We were getting a lot of weird phone calls for about a month (starting in early May) and on the caller ID it said "private number." These calls were during the afternoons and evenings and frequently at eleven or twelve at night. The person didn't say a word and sat with the line open until we hung up. It began to get creepy when Franco was at work. I thought I could hear breathing.

The first solution would be to block private numbers. Unfortunately, calls from the gate come up as a private number and we don't want to block them.

Next we talked to Comcast. The people who work at Comcast were extremely nice and told us all kinds of useless information. Apparently none of them actually knew how to help us and had different interpretations of the handy-dandy notes they have on the subject. Basically, they couldn't tell us who the caller was and could not do anything helpful. They said we needed to call the police.

The local police didn't want to take my report until I logged ten calls. Once I had my ten calls, they took a report (never asking for the log) and then I didn't hear back. I called again. Two days later a very nice officer called and told me that they couldn't do much for me. If someone threatened to harm us, then that would be a felony under a FCC "terrorist threat" law of some sort. Then they would subpoena the phone records and prosecute. Since the person was quiet it is considered a misdemeanor and the D.A. isn't prosecuting those. Yep, go ahead and commit misdemeanors right now because the law doesn't have time for them.

Anyways, since we didn't want to change our phone number, we started working with the HOA to see if they couldn't get that gate to come up as something besides a private number. Our contact there is a nice woman who said she encountered a problem like ours before... !!!Someone's gate code (say #1003) was similar to the code you type in to call our house (100). She changed our code and we haven't had another call. Apparently our prank caller was the gate. Well, it was some idiot neighbor that doesn't know how to type in their gate code correctly and is too rude to apologize when we answer. The breathing I heard was likely the wind blowing over the call box.

I'm happy to say that it seems that our problem has been solved! Woo-hoo.