Slaying Trolls In Real Life (sort of)

Near the end of every semester, we have “overnights”, where the building is open 24 hours a day over the weekend.  This includes the various labs and lockups, so computer lab workers can sign up for shifts for what day of the week they want.  I usually enjoy Friday nights because they give me the rest of the weekend to recuperate from forcing myself awake for a 12-8 shift.  I was unfortunate this semester, and signed up just a little bit too late and while I did get my Friday Nights, I was assigned to the main building.  Generally the other building is quieter and I can get more work done, while I’ve had some bad experiences working in the main building during over nights… with angry photo kids, and broken printers, and all kinds of nonsense. But that’s for another day, maybe.

This semester the overnights were HORRIBLY  advertised.  Almost no one knew they were this weekend, so there was only one person in the lab until about 130 AM, then nothing.  Well, almost nothing…
I settled in to work on my watercolor homework at about 2AM when the phone rang.  How unusual!  Maybe there was something wrong at the other building?  I picked up with a standard  “700 Lockup!”, and was met with a “STACY SWANSON?!”  Oh, wrong number, I informed the man, who spoke very choppy English with a thick accent.  But no, it was not a wrong number.  It was a prank caller.  A very, very tenacious prank caller.  I really like prank calls, actually.  They’re like real, live internet trolls, and you know how I feel about trolls.  (mmm… mincemeat.)

I did treat it as a serious call for a while just in case it WAS and there would be any ramifications, running some tests at the same time to check.  Fortunately I did not give him my name or any other information, though I accidentally leaked the word Boston at the beginning, when I wasn’t sure if it was serious, but that couldn’t be helped, its in the name of my school, though he seemed to miss the school part!

At 2:10ish AM, this person called the lock up phone and tried to claim that someone named Stacy Swanson had bought a bunch of donuts from the “donuts to go/Krispy Kreme” he works at on 54th st, and had written a bad check for $8.50, and “this was the number she wrote on the check”. He spoke as though he had a problem with English, and kept demanding the money. At first I did wonder if this was legit and the guy really did have a communication barrier, so I tried to reason through it, explaining that no one named Stacy Swanson worked here. It never really seemed to sink in. Then I asked him to repeat the address and Google maps searched it, turns out there’s no 54th st in Boston, and the only one in all of MA was in a residential district. I gave him this information and he started yelling ” GOOGLE LIES!!!” and repeating his address, “You owe me $8.50 dollar” and the name Stacy Swanson over and over.  After a short time of me trying to take it seriously enough in case it was real (don’t want him calling back, so it had to be resolved whether it was real OR fake), and trying to find evidence it was a prank and not actually serious (“Isn’t a dog against health regulations?” Since there was one barking off and on). He finally got fed up of me trying to divert him to management and yelled “GO HELL”, so I figured the conversation was over, thanked him, and hung up. Then I sat down to write up the story.

Then the phone rings again, and he’s pissed that I hung up on him. “WHY YOU HANG UP!!??” then “I NEVER SWEAR AT YOU I NEVER SWEAR” At this point I really am not sure what to think of it, why would he call back? Clearly he’ll call back if I hang up again so I decide the best course of action is to make HIM hang up so he doesn’t call back. Unfortunately for him, I’m a regular troll-slayer on internet forums so he had no idea what kind of endurance for circular arguments and nonsense I have. I actually like doing stuff like this. Many times I explain to him that I:
1) Don’t know Stacy Swanson
2) Have no one by that name in the system
3) am not Stacy Swanson
4) do not even like donuts.

I made a mistake in the beginning by mentioning Boston, so I had to cover that by confirming that he did not in fact live in Boston. Simple. I asked him what the weather was like, he hesitated and claimed he was not outside (there was a wind chime…), so I asked him to go and check. He resisted heavily, clearly because he didn’t actually know what the weather was like in Boston, so I convinced him to check by telling him that if he could not tell me such simple information as what the weather was like, then how could I believe any of his other claims. He raced outside of course, really angry. He said it was “nice”, so I asked him if there were any clouds, and he said No it is nice!! Wrong answer. Then after he insisted I was lying, I asked him another simple question: are there any puddles on the ground? “Not in my backyard”. Two errors. There are a lot of puddles around Boston because it rained all day, and why would you have a backyard in your business? Not to mention his other error, first claiming it was “Donuts to go”– a privately owned business, then claiming it was a branch of Krispy Kreme, and changing the street of it from 54 to 58 then to 56 for a while, then dropping numbers on the street address… then claiming that the name was printed on the righthand side of a personal check, and there was no address or bank name printed and that she hand-wrote the check… so amateur. He claimed she wrote “F-f-f-f-fooolin” on the check, which I pretended to take seriously at first, and dropped my voice to a dead-serious tone and informed him of what that could potentially mean (she ripped you off), then when he realized that it could dead-end the conversation he started going on about Def Leppard, and got really offended when I told him I had no clue what he was talking about because I didn’t like the band. There were a couple other amusing bits, where he got confused and thought I was from California, and that there were no Donuts in California… and that even though he managed to drive a JAGUAR, he was concerned enough about his $8.50 to call around at 230 am.

He also pretended to be convinced that I was actually Stacy Swanson and wrote the check, and that I was decieving him.  But what really stumped him was when I deferred to management, saying that I could take his name and number for my manager to call him back as soon as possible. He refused and said he wanted to talk to Stacy Swanson NOW, and couldn’t get past my rationale of “It’s 230 am. I am the only employee. I am not Stacy Swanson, we just proved that (by walking him through physical descriptions of people and getting him to say yes or no). Even if she did work here she could not talk to you.”

Unfortunately for him, his DAD cut the conversation short. The phone went silent for a second, and a very, very different voice came on with a VERY different accent, asking me who I was. I confirmed that he wasn’t another pranker trying to lead me on, and he wasn’t. Apparently this kid was calling from someplace in Texas, and the Stacy Swanson issue happened to his dad before, and that’s how he came up with the story. His dad apologized and we hung up.

That kid is in so much trouble. He’ll probably never prank call anyone again, I just wish that call had been recorded. And to his credit, he did do a really good job keeping up the fake accent and fake language barrier, even if logic and common sense failed him.  It must be the schools.

Best overnight ever. I have reached level 19 Troll Slayer.

~ by Anath on April 4, 2009.