The Moose Has Landed

An older gentleman came in today with a slip of paper wanting to know if a specific phone number was still valid. After going through the gamut of reference questions where I must figure out what in heaven's name this guy actually wants. It becomes clear, kind of, sort of. This guy wants to contact a long lost friend in order to tell them of a family member's death. The actual interview takes 3x the usual amount of time but I finally figure it out.


My immediate unspoken response was..."Have you called the actual number?"


...I mean come on it's a phone number for God's sake. If you want to know if it's a valid number DIAL IT!

My actual spoken response..."Let's see what I can find out for you" ...Freakin' customer service brainwashing.


The Older Gentleman is uncertain of the spelling of the persons first name which was when I asked myself the question "Um...how close a friend where you if you don't know how to spell the person's first name?"


I am unable to locate the lost friend on the Internet and really don't want to continue this search because the guy has phone number and won't. call. it.


Finally he asks me to look up a relative of the person he's looking for. Okay, I'll humor him so ...whack! irony hits me on the side of the head with....oh yes, a hit. I found the relative on peoplefinder which lists the individuals last known cities of residence and known relatives.



I show the Older Gentleman my results and he starts asking me questions which have no context like...he must be the son, or a nephew and she must be his aunt. Right? Huh? Who? WTF.



I finally said "Sir I have no idea what you're talking about, I don't know these people or their relationship to each other. "

A lot of the websites for finding people just dangle a little bit of information in front of you so you'll pay the $14.95 a month for their services. Which might be worth it for some but not for me and well not for this guy either because even if he gets contact information like, say, a phone number he won't call it.


Finally I convinced the guy to try the actual number that he already had and if that didn't work out he could always call 411 (which he had to write down so he'd remember it, we are talking about the number for information...INFORMATION.) in each of the cities the long lost friends relative has lived in and see if there's anyone by the name of Moose listed. Yes the family he's looking for has MOOSE as a surname.

I almost asked if his last name was Ox as in dumb as an...

But that would be rude and against my customer service programming....