Update on Nova Scotia

A couple of years ago I mentioned a problem with a fax machine from Nova Scotia that had been going on for several years. It would call relentlessly, all day long, starting before 8 am, every few minutes.

It was especially a problem on the day that I blogged about it, because I was using Verizon DSL for Internet instead of cable, and it would drop my VPN every time the phone rang because there was no DSL filter on my burglar alarm. (Long story here.)

Anyway, the day I blogged about it was the last time I heard from them for a while.

Some time passed before the fax machine started calling again. It was still Nova Scotia, but one digit in the phone number was different. And in reviewing that old blog post, I discovered that it had been two years almost to the day; and that the calls the previous year had also been in January.

I suspect that telemarketers and junk faxers don't work on that kind of a schedule. Businesses do, though.

I Googled the new number and found out that it was the "incoming faxes only" line for a water testing lab that was part of a bigger company that dealt in frozen seafood.

New Bedford... frozen seafood... hmmm. Yes, it was starting to make sense.

Probably this outfit was trying to buy fish from a supplier in New Bedford. Maybe their regular fax machine was on the blink, so they went down the hallway to use the water testing lab's fax machine instead. And if their fax machines are anything like that piece of crap I sit next to at work, it didn't give up after the first try. It just kept dialing and dialing and dialing.

Actually, it didn't keep dialing this time. Not that day. I have a new phone with a BLOCK button that, when pressed, causes the phone to not-ring on any future incoming calls from that number, and when the answering machine picks up, it sends an obnoxious beep that tells the caller there's something wrong.

So I pushed BLOCK and thought the problem was solved; but just to be on the safe side, I went to the company's website and explained the situation.

The next day, when I came home from work, I found six more calls from them on my caller ID. (I still have other phones that DON'T have the blocking feature, so I still get a list of blocked calls.)

But only six. Maybe someone read my email during mid-fax and stopped the machine, because I'm telling you, that machine usually doesn't give up after only six tries.

That was three weeks ago. They never did reply to my email, so I'll never know for sure what that really was all about. I also don't know for sure that they won't try again next year. But now I know who they are, and I have all their contact info, and I have access to a fax machine that's just as tireless as theirs.