BETWEEN THE LINES: TELEPHONES BRING PEOPLE CLOSER WITHOUT ROOM FOR MISTAKES

Why do people with Caller ID continue to return calls to someone they don't even know or to unrecognized numbers.

Nearly 73,000 BellAtlantic workers went on strike Sunday and telephone service continues among the East Coast states affected by the strike.

Because most of the telephone services now are automated, the customers can still receive and place calls. But there are some delays and problems with installations, maintenance and directory assistance.

Now that there aren't enough operators around to answer those aggravating directory assistance questions, I'd guess local libraries and newspapers will field more calls.

For some reason, still unknown to me, people believe that the library and newspaper offices possess all the trivial knowledge so vital to their lives.

And I can vouch for the bizarre calls and questions that come to newspaper offices. I've answered plenty of calls from people seeking answers to questions that require more research than some news stories.

I've answered plenty of sports questions from callers curious about football trivia, the Super Bowl and baseball scores. I once settled a bet between two friends by telling them which Super Bowl year it was. Other people just want to know a person's name or a local phone number.

The most amazing thing is that I often have the answer to their questions. I happen to know lots of useless information that has actually turned out to be rather useful in my career. Who knew that playing those trivia games would come in so handy?

But for every silly question that we answer at our office -- and I seem to be the person who answers a majority of them -- there are just as many wrong number calls.

With the invention of cellular phones and hotline numbers, several people mistakenly call the news offices after 5 p.m. in hopes of checking the amount of time left in their calling plans. I often explain that the number was simply misdialed. A few weeks ago, one persistent caller phoned five times before giving up.

And those annoying calls don't just stop with cellular telephones. I've answered my fair share of returned calls from Caller IDs after our telemarketing department calls. Here's a hint: If you haven't got a clue as to why the Southeast Missourian would be calling, then it's probably not worth the effort to return the call. And if we really want to reach you, we'll keep trying.

My theory is that if you have Caller ID and can't identify a call you have received, why should you call back? The same theory holds true with pagers.

About two weeks ago, some stranger named Brian called my home at 1 a.m. on a Saturday to ask if I'd just paged him. Because I don't even know anyone named Brian, I doubted it was really me who called him. But I was still too sleepy to relay that information. Nor did I ask why he would return a page without knowing who might have been calling.

Last Monday I paged my father at work only to learn that he'd traded in his pager for another number. I received a call back from the man who took my father's old pager number. (Since they both work for the same company it was sort of an even swap.) But Dennis called me without realizing who he had called or why -- and all I wanted was to talk to my dad.

Sure these devices -- cellular phones, Caller ID and pagers -- were designed to keep people in touch, but I'm not so sure it's such a great idea. Sometimes it's best to just be unidentified, especially when you dial a wrong number.

~Laura Johnston is a copy editor for the Southeast Missourian.