Photo Credit: Louis Hansel. Unsplash.
I had the most autistic experience of my life talking to a crank caller in Aldi today. When I got the call, I'd already been unsettled by a weird Twitter DM I got from @Norman_911. She's a hot SoCal blonde who's been on Twitter since 2011. She sent a .gif of Napoleon Dynamite shyly waving hello. THAT got my dorky-ass attention, so I checked out her profile...and was not impressed. In fact, I kind of hoped she was really a bot, but her "follow" list is too small and too tightly focused on very specific things to be a good one. On the plus side, she's really into luxury sports cars and NASA. But then, she's also VERY into Elon Musk and crypto--yuck. Also, did I mention she was a smoking hot blonde from Beverly Hills? Out. Of. My. League.
Then I glanced over her feed and saw something strange. Despite the dozens of tweets giggling at Elon Musk's latest missive, she liked a comment I made in support of Stephen King's blue check indignation. Strange indeed. Strangest of all, though, was that she changed her tagline while I was scrolling through her profile. Originally, it read something like, "Follow me before chatting so that we can discuss ETH and crypto. Entrepreneur." Yet when I looked at her profile again later, her tagline had changed to "Believe in Love." Creepy. As. Hell. I just had a bad feeling about that. If I answered that DM, I'm pretty sure the story would have ended no other way than with me in a pit and lotion in a basket. So I did not respond.
About twenty minutes later is when the creepy, pervy, yet Beckett-like crank call came. The conversation had no actual thread and stopped making sense halfway through, so I'm doing my best in relating it here.
The dude claimed to be calling from US Border Patrol and Customs Patrol over a suspicious package that they had intercepted that was addressed to me. He was calling from a Washington, D.C. number, so I was inclined to take him seriously. He also had a Mexican accent, which also made me take him seriously because it's not uncommon for Mexicans who have become U. S. citizens to join ICE, Border Patrol, and Customs. I have four former students who've done just that. However, as I've been borrowing addresses for the past six months while waiting on permanent housing, I was immediately on edge.
First, he said that a suspicious package had arrived from Mexico addressed to me. Enter autism! Instead of wondering what his badge number was, or his station number, or even his NAME, my first response was, "I haven't ordered anything from Mexico, so I think there's been some sort of a mistake." He assured me that the package was addressed to me. I asked what was in the package, and he responded with, "well, we've scanned it and picked up traces of controlled substances, and it's very suspicious."
"What kind of controlled substances?" The guy related that they had picked up traces of cocaine and heroin on a package addressed to me. My auditory processing is garbage, so that makes it tough for me to parse dialects. It was hard to understand him at times. However, his accent kept coming and going and that also made it hard for me to follow. Even so, I pressed forward, saying, "That's impossible. I've just ordered two dresses from eBay, but nothing from Mexico."
"But we have this package and it clearly has significant amounts of cocaine and heroin in it--" he related in a wavering accent. Okay. But like, what ELSE was in the package?
All I could think was, my dude. I am working on my recovery coach certification. I did NOT order a box of drugs from Mexico. I told him, "Yeah, uh, I'm about to be certified as a Recovery Coach in New York State, and I have two people who can vet me on this. I'm not ordering drugs from Mexico. There has been a mistake." I kept waiting for him to confirm my identity or my current address, but he didn't. And his accent was becoming unintelligible to me at this point, so I finally advocated for myself. I said, "I'm having trouble understanding you because your accent is very strong. Can I please speak to a supervisor? Now?"
A pause. "The package contained sex toys. There were traces of cocaine on them."
Sweet mercy of fuck, I know for a FACT I have not ordered sex toys from Mexico. Nor would I. Japan and Scandinavia are my favorite cultures for that sort of thing. And even if I HAD ordered something it would definitely, absolutely, not contain any cocaine or heroin. On the off chance that I'd been dealing with a first-day Customs agent lackey who is really bad at his job, I gave this call a few more seconds, for fun and caution.
"I did NOT order sex toys from Mexico. Those drugs are absolutely not mine."
The dude re-iterated the sex toys and cocaine claims a few more times. I kept countering with the fact that I am about to be a recovery coach and have not ordered dick from Mexico. I finally told him, "I've told you they aren't mine, and I have no idea why we are still talking. What do you want me to do here? You're VERY unprofessional. Can I please speak to your supervisor?"
"You fucking bitch. You're in trouble. You're been caught with drugs being mail-" Bingo. pervy crank caller. A hateful one who by now had begun to sound strangely like White Goodman from Dodgeball, if the character had had a dodgy Mexican accent.
"And YOU'RE being unprofessional," I said. That's not how you're supposed to talk to people. I need to speak to your supervisor. Now. Or I'm hanging up."
"You fucking bitch. " Growly and nasty undertone there. "You fucking goddamn bitch!"
"Yeah," I yawned into the phone, "you're not from Customs and this call is bullshit. I'm hanging up now and filing a police report about this."
"You goddamn fucking bit-"
Click.
I mean, this call was shocking in a lot of ways. Perhaps the most shocking about it is that I still have no idea why the guy called. The entire time, it felt like he was just trying to keep me on the phone. THAT pissed me off because I had frozen stuff in my cart that was melting and I needed to get in the checkout line. Sex toys smeared with cocaine and heroin? THAT was pure improvisation. The guy clearly had no script for either seducing me or conning me out of anything. Seriously. If he WAS a con artist, he should go watch the Boiler Room and take some goddamn notes. If he's a perv, he really needs to up his game, because that was pitiful and frightening. It was also straaaaagne; whatever happened to just calling up randos to ask if they were wearing underwear and then just getting hung up on? Drugs in a package of sex toys indiscreetly mailed to me from Mexico? THAT's a stretch.
The thing that gives me pause, though, is why I let the call go on for so long before hanging up. Letting a crank call go that long and get that creepy is also pretty pitiful. But when I think about it, I get it.
As an autistic person, I am accustomed to constant self-doubt in all conversations. I have zero cognitive empathy when I am talking to people face-to-face. I rely on context clues and prior knowledge of the person and the situation to make sense of most conversations--which is impossible with strangers, by the way. Talking to strangers 0n the phone is even more difficult. By default, I just naturally assume that whoever I am talking to is being honest and can be taken at face value until proven otherwise. In this case, that took too long.
It took me a really long time to pick up on fairly obvious clues that this call was creepy and pervy. My very autistic response to his questions was to immediately realize that he was wrong, that there'd been a mistake, and that I could probably prove it. I should have been more bothered by the fact that he hadn't confirmed my identity or the alleged mailing address to see if it really was me. I should have been bothered that he never gave me his name, badge number, station location, or anything else that would have backed his story. But my mind didn't go there because I am used to badly misreading phone conversations with strangers, and my misunderstandings are often epic. Usually, I'm wrong. But today, I wouldn't have been, if I'd been more used to engaging with these kinds of phone conversations a little more critically.
It's not for nothing that autistic people are the victims of abuse and assault at rates that are significantly higher than is found in the general neurotypical population. We have zero survival instincts and attract all manner of abusers and predators for that reason. We never understand the truth until it is far too late. I'm so grateful that today's exchange was a phone call and nothing in person with a dude wearing a fake badge.
About the only thing that could cheer me up after that was my roommate, Will. He had two reactions when I told him the story. His first response was, "dude needs to go back to con artist college." Precisely. Then Will spent twenty minutes recreating the voice of White Goodman but with a bad Mexican accent. Will is infamous for his character voices, and he fuckin' nailed it. That is EXACTLY what the guy sounded like, and it was goddamn hilarious.
It was good to have a big laugh like that after the past several months I've had.
