Oct 14, 2003 4 min read

I have absolutely no idea who he was. I’m sure this has happened to us all at one time or another.

You pick up the phone and on the other end of the line is a voice you recognize. Or think you recognize. So instead of the usual polite conversation, you banter with the caller, who you think is someone else.

Yes, it happens to us all. It happened to me. I’ll start at the beginning.

I have a cousin named Keith. He has a personality you could compare to sandpaper. Some call him a character. Others call him worse, I suppose, but he has a heart as large as a mountain and would do anything for you. I have known him all my life. He even babysat me when I was a kid.

Just to give you an idea, he answers his own home phone with a loud, “Duffy’s Bar and Grill,’ or “Go ahead, it’s your nickel,’ or something in that same vein.

I don’t see him much anymore, although he and his wife maintain a pretty close tie with my parents.

Anyway, my mother told me to expect a call from him. I located a couple of family graves here in town that some distant relatives were searching for and had asked my cousin to find. He wants me to show him where they are.

So when the phone rang at the office the other day, the voice on the other end of the line sounded like my cousin. The tone, the inflection, even the way he pronounced his words.

“Is this Jim Pletcher?’ the caller asked.

“Yes,’ I said.

“Well you sound just like you look in your picture,’ the caller replied. I guessed the caller was referring to the photo of me that appears with this column. But at that moment, I thought it was my cousin.

So I said, “Oh, I sound fat, do I?’

Silence.

“I suppose you want to know where those graves are?’ I said.

The caller sputtered slightly and asked me why I took a certain stock listing out of the paper. An odd question for my cousin to ask since he doesn’t get our newspaper.

My mind turned for a moment. Why is he asking me about stocks? This is my cousin, right? I decided to play it safe.

So I explained how and from where we get our stock listings, turning from jabbing to polite. “I will make sure the stock gets back in for you,’ I continued, waiting for the caller to identify himself as my cousin.

He never did. He thanked me and said goodbye.

I felt like an idiot, not a feeling I’m unfamiliar with.

“I guess it wasn’t him,’ I said to myself.

But then, as I was preparing to e-mail our news service to ask them to restore the deleted stock listing, I decided to check to make sure it really was deleted. It wasn’t. The stock the man asked for was still in our daily listing as well as our Sunday stock spread.

So, just who was it that called? Was it really a reader who didn’t see the stock in our newspaper?

I have no idea. Could it have been my cousin? I doubt it. The caller didn’t seem too anxious to ask me much of anything else after I wanted to know if he was calling me about graves. He probably thought I was some kind of ghoul or maybe I was suggesting that anyone who calls me is taking his life into his own hands.

Well, I am not a ghoul. But there are people who probably thought major injury would be preferable to talking to me on the telephone.

I don’t know. And rather than wonder too much about it, I think I’ll call my cousin rather than wait for him to call me.

Maybe I’ll tell him I’m selling grave sites.

Just kidding.

Have a good day.

Jim Pletcher is the Herald-Standard’s business editor. E-mail: jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.