Natasha Lavoie’s life turned into a comedy of errors worthy of a farce when her phone number was plastered on T-shirts peddling the fictitious tale of a missing cat named Torbo. Naturally, her own cat, Mauser, blissfully ignorant of the chaos, remained ensconced at home. The phone rang incessantly for a year, until her partner, Jonathan McCurrach, confronted one persistent caller. The caller, with the nonchalance of a prankster caught red-handed, revealed the shirt was a gag, purchased online, promising untold riches for the return of the non-existent feline.
And who was the unlucky recipient of this juvenile prank? Ms. Lavoie, of course. Her phone, a modern-day Sisyphus, was cursed to ring unpredictably, day and night, in a cruelly sporadic torment. Her initial suspicions leaned towards the metaphysical: had she angered the gods of retail, or perhaps a jilted customer service representative? Her quest for answers led to Wisdumb, the American company behind this sartorial misadventure, to uncover why her number was chosen as the hotline for a wayward cat.
In this digital age of endless connectivity, where privacy is a relic of the past, Ms. Lavoie’s plight serves as a reminder that our personal information is but a plaything for the capricious. With technology advancing at a pace that would make Moore’s Law blush, perhaps the real mystery is how we haven’t all become victims of such absurdity. As for Ms. Lavoie, she’s left to ponder the existential dread of her phone’s unpredictable serenade, a symphony of misdirected intentions.
