Don’t call me, and other modern-day annoyances

MY son was in the other room on the phone, and he sounded like me, which is not always a good thing. By the time I caught on, he was asking for the supervisor’s supervisor. Usually, he gets mad at me when I lose it with customer service representatives, but here he was, channeling me at my worst. It had to be bad.

It was.

He and his girlfriend are moving. She called the utility companies, the way you do, to arrange for billing at the new place. One of them was the gas company, for the stove and the dryer and I’m not sure what else. That’s when it started.

They took her phone number. And my son’s, too — ostensibly for the gas company, not for internet service. (Setting up internet service is something he has been doing for me since he was about seven, which was after he started coding and cared more than I did about speed and reliability.) Yet that’s what he was receiving a call about.

Allconnect, the company he was on the phone with, “provides consumers with comparative shopping services so they can save money on satellite and cable TV, Internet, phone, and home security services,” according to its profile on Inc.com. In other words, telemarketing. It turns out that they have a national partnership with local gas companies — companies that you have no choice but to give your number to if you want to cook. My son asked them to take his name off their list. They didn’t.

I shop for shoes online, and the next morning I wake up with ads on every page for shoes. I remember when Derek Bok, then the president of Harvard, lamented that the brightest minds in America were going to law school. These days, they are writing algorithms to sell shoes. Which might be OK, if I’m really looking for shoes. But I stopped looking at Hondas months ago, and they are still inundating me. Algorithms be damned, we chose the Mini.

And once in a while, don’t we all search for things we don’t want to be reminded about the next morning, particularly if anyone else is around?

There was a case study of one of the big retailers using data to pitch to pregnant women. At first, it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped: The women should have been buying their prenatal vitamins and the rest, but they weren’t. Why? Because they were spooked. In some cases, they hadn’t even told their husbands they were pregnant yet. So the retailer started adding gardening equipment — not the obvious interest of a pregnant woman — to the ad along with prenatal supplies, and boom! Pay dirt. Who were these people to know you were pregnant before your husband? Actually, they even knew you felt that way.

The spam filter works some of the time, but I still get spam every day, so I never open anything from someone I don’t know. Yesterday, I missed an appointment that way; I didn’t even look at the email confirming the appointment, because it came from a name I didn’t know.

On the other hand, most of the spam comes from the accounts of people whose names I do know, and I wonder — for a second — if they might actually be getting in touch. Then I see my name in alphabetical order with a few others in the recipient list, and I know. And wonder if my contacts will be next.

The phone is my nemesis. It rings and beeps constantly, and it is almost never anyone who wants to do anything but sell. Mostly I don’t recognize the numbers, so I don’t answer. But they trick you now, using local numbers in your area code that might be the dermatologist, except they aren’t. There’s that telltale pause when you pick up the phone, and the person on the other hand realizes they have a live wire. “Is this the Estrich family?” they ask.

The Estrich family comprises me and four dogs; my kids have a different surname. Occasionally, I ask if they are selling dog food, which prompts a pause. Mostly, I just say no. I feel bad for the people calling, but not bad enough to hear about timeshares. I say, “Please don’t call again,” like you are supposed to do, and somehow, the phone keeps ringing. At least I don’t have to call the gas company to set up service — or tell their telemarketing partner to go away.

Susan Estrich is a USC law professor and liberal political activist.