The Fall Guy

The evening began unremarkably, but it didn’t stay that way for long.

My friend Craig was in town for the weekend, and we went out to dinner, then headed back to my apartment to prepare for whatever late-night activities we’d planned.

The resident manager was hovering in the service elevator like a bat, and when she saw me she swooped out, flapping her leathery wings in a state of agitation.

“Thank God you’re alright!” she gasped.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked, bewildered.

“The fire department was here!” she said. “They broke down your door because they thought you needed help.”

“Why on earth would they think that?”

“Someone called them,” she said.

It must be a prank, I concluded, unaware that I was both the victim and the perpetrator.

The key lay in a small box on my desk.

As Craig and I caught our breath, our heads still spinning, I noticed the light blinking on my answering machine. There were two messages.

I recognized the first voice immediately. It was that of a brainless woman who’d called on several occasions, looking for her sister. Each time I told her she had the wrong number, yet she always tried again after a month or two, apparently hoping for a different outcome.

This time she was clearly distraught:

Oh my God! I have the wrong number, but now I don’t know what to do! Hold on! I’ll call 911! I’ll call 911!

The other message was from an emergency operator:

Ma’am, this is the fire department. Can you hear me? Don’t worry; we’ll be right there. Do not try to move.

Why would a pair of strangers think I was a damsel in distress? By the time I heard the second message, the ice-cold truth had slapped me in the face: It was my outgoing greeting.

Not long before, I’d recorded what I thought was a funny message, a parody of a much-mocked commercial that was ubiquitous at the time. In a high, quavering voice, I mewled:

Help! I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up. And to make matters worse, the battery in my LifeCall alert system seems to be dead. So please leave a message, and I’ll call you back … if they find me in time.

It blew my mind (and still does, all these years later) that two different people – one of them a 911 operator! – could be stupid enough to think someone who’d lost their balance would have time to record a message on the way to the floor. But you can bet I changed the greeting.

A decade and a half later, after a dread diagnosis and a fall that broke my arm, I actually did get a monitoring system. Who says irony is dead?

Thanks to Derek for the reminder.