This message is not for you, call me back.

I received a Google Voice (GV) invite a few months ago and quickly picked the perfect number to hand out.  You know what I’m talking about right?  A number in the right area code with good repetition?  I spent about 30 minutes finding the perfect number and about another hour setting the GV account up, complete with a personalized greeting I recorded that says my name.  I set the GV to forward to my cell phone with a cool “announce” feature where callers have to say their name before you accept that call.  Neat right?

Now apparently GV is good because you can forward it to all your other phones and have special settings so that, for example, when your child’s school calls your phones ring at home, work, cell, etc. ensuring you are always reachable by who you want to be reached by and can just send all the other calls to voice mail without ever hearing them ring.  Not really sure how this would benefit me more than what I currently do, which is use my cell phone number and ONLY my cell phone number because I carry my cell phone with me everywhere, including my home, work, and on my person when I go out, I never ended up giving out my GV number, what was the point?  I let all my cell calls go to voicemail 90% of the time already and frankly I don’t need anyone to announce their calls, I just don’t give my number to anyone I don’t want to talk to at all.  It sounded like a good idea at the time and I admit that I was excited to have gotten the GV invitation.

Never having given out the GV number I was at first surprised and then annoyed at how many calls I was getting from it.  At first I figured it was a fluke, a wrong number, or a mis-dial, but then it became apparent that it was much more than that.

Since June I have been getting calls for a woman named Jill Glenn.  Jill it seems is trying to get a job as a teacher, or substitute teacher and she must have sent out her resume to every school district in the city because every day I get calls from a school district or a principal asking for her to come in and interview.  LAUSD, Carthay Circle Elementary, Eagle Rock Elementary, etc, etc.  A teacher looking for a job; can you imagine how many calls I got during the summer?   I long ago put GV on do not disturb and don’t even get the messages emailed to me anymore, after all no one *I* actually know has the number.

Now you may be thinking, “wow Amanda, what a bitch you are, that woman is looking for a job!  She wants to teach the youth!  You could tell the people that they have the wrong number!”  but here are the facts:

1. Jill Glenn put the wrong phone number on her resume and applications.

2. Jill Glenn has failed to notice this.

3. I don’t want a person who doesn’t know their own phone number or doesn’t proofread their own resume teaching children anything.

and FINALLY and most important, what kind of idiot calls a number where the message says “Hi this is AMANDA LEON please leave a message and I’ll call you back” then proceeds to leave a message (sometimes multiple ones) that say this: “Hi, um, this message is for Jill Glenn, yadda yadda yadda”.  Today I checked the GV account and sure enough there were 20 messages.  I’ve had this number for 5 months people and I’m stilling getting calls from people trying to hire a teacher, in November no less!

Google Voice does allow you to change your GV number only once, at a charge of $10.  For a number that I never gave out in the first place?  No thank you!  I give up, and it’s only because it was so hard to get a damned invite to GV in the first place that I haven’t completely deleted the whole account out of frustration.

Anyway if you know anyone named Jill Glenn looking for a teaching job is Los Angeles, now you know why she is still unemployed.