Guardian columnist Tim Dowling has detailed a bewildering and oddly humorous encounter with a potential phone scammer that left him questioning the very nature of modern fraud.
A Suspicious Call Takes a Comic Turn
Dowling, who typically avoids unknown numbers, made an exception after sending an email requesting an interview. Hoping the call was a response, he answered to find a man on the line from what sounded like a busy call centre. The caller, addressing him as Tim, claimed to have urgent questions about an account Dowling had supposedly set up.
When Dowling repeatedly asked "What account?" and "With who?", the conversation quickly unravelled. The caller, after a pause, appeared to giggle and then laugh openly, mentioning a fictitious colleague named Tony before becoming too hysterical to continue. Dowling was left with the sound of muffled snorts before hanging up, feeling both bewildered and oddly insulted by the lack of professionalism.
The Blurred Line Between Fraud and Farce
Reflecting on the incident with his eldest son, Dowling mused that the caller might have been a novice scammer who forgot his script. "Maybe he was on his first day of being a phone scammer, and forgot to read the part of the script where he pretends to be from my bank," he suggested. The experience highlighted a growing confusion where deliberate fraud and sheer incompetence become indistinguishable, each feeling like a tactic to baffle the target.
This wasn't Dowling's first recent brush with baffling modern interactions. He recalled a previous incident where a delivery notification text included a photo of a stranger named Dave on his own doorstep, holding Dowling's parcel. The package arrived separately later, leaving him to wonder if it was a coincidental error or an elaborate scam he never understood.
The Return of Ron: A Defence Against Chaos
Faced with this landscape of confusion, Dowling found himself nostalgically recalling his invented, charmless personal assistant, Ron. For years, Ron would monosyllabically field cold calls, claiming no knowledge of Dowling's availability and radiating a clear disinterest in passing on messages. "Ron was, in many ways, my truest self," Dowling wrote. "Ron knew what was going on."
This memory became useful moments later when another unknown number called. Instinctively adopting Ron's unfortunate manner, Dowling almost dismissed the caller before realising it was, in fact, the genuine interview subject he had been waiting for. The moment underscored the absurd tightrope of modern communication, where guarding against scams can mean almost missing real connections.
The column ultimately paints a picture of daily life where scepticism is essential but often inadequate, and where the most effective defence might sometimes be a deliberately unhelpful alter ego.
