Calls to the States...

Monday, May 8, 2006

Well, something interesting happened this morning in my Wolof class. There are three of us in the class right now. It is typically very laid back accompanied with a lot of laughter. Well, because my teacher’s cell phone had been blowing up all morning, I decided that I would covertly call a buddy of mine who was sitting three seats over. Its pretty much the game we used to play in high school or maybe a few months ago

I undid the keypad lock and pressed the talk button. Well, his phone ended up having a dead battery and being off, so the joke didn’t work. Unfortunately, the joke was on me though. I put my phone back into my pocket (I’m sitting here typing in my room, its 8 pm and I just saw the f’n mouse just run into my room so I really wish I had a baseball bat right now) and focused my attention on an endless flow of Wolof.

Thirty minutes later (I’m still in class), my phone rings, and I notice it is a non-Senegal number, but I just didn’t know who it was. It was around 10:00 am, so I was fairly perplexed on who it could be. Since my voice mail hasn’t been set up yet (not an easy process) and I wasn’t going to answer in class, I was curious. It is a rarity for the phone to ring, so I wanted to find out who was actually calling 1-900-HOT-LAND. So, a few minutes later, during a short class break, I called the number back.

Well, it turned out it was one of my dad’s office numbers that called. I only have his cell phone number in my phone book, so that is why the number didn’t show up on my caller id.. Fortunately, I recognized his voice when he answered. While I had one question answered, I still didn’t know why he called, especially so early (Texas is 4 hours back right now, 5 hours back sometimes due to DST)…so I asked.

As it turns out, my dad got a phone call from me when I was in class. Apparently, he got a nice two minute session of wolof class as a message. I don’t know what anyone would want more than that. I couldn’t figure out why this happened, so I did a little investigating.

During this investigation process, I realized I should have majored in criminal justice and become a detective instead of coming to Africa. As it turns out, my pockets where somehow setting off my speed dial on my phone and conveniently calling the states. My dad wasn’t the only one who got called either…a total of two calls where placed during my class…both to the states. I don’t know a better way to use cell phone minutes then making long distance calls to the states and not even knowing it.
The thing that I learned from this experience is that the first ten numbers I entered into my phone, which apparently are assigned as speed dial numbers (I don’t even know how to use speed dial on a good day) shouldn’t have been numbers of people in the states. Because I’m not going to change this, maybe you will get lucky and get a call at 6 am from Senegal, only to hear the muffled sounds of a mysterious language being spoken.