He said it wasn’t a sales call. I knew he was lying.

Any call on my landline is automatically suspect. these days people call my mobile phone. I’d get rid of the landline, but it is part of a bundle with my internet and it would cost me more to cancel the service than to keep it.

The connection wasn’t the greatest, but the caller, who didn’t identify himself, assured me it wasn’t a sales call. He was calling about my rental hot water heater. Winter was coming, and he wanted to have someone check it. Would Wednesday between 3 and 5 p.m. work?

I have experience with water heaters, having had a couple rupture in the course of my years as a home owner. I no longer rent, having learned it is cheaper for companies to pay off insurance claims than proactively replace the heaters. I know how old mine is, what its projected lifespan is and when I should look at replacing it.

But I decided to play along anyway. The number was blocked, so i asked if he was calling on behalf of a local company. He said yes. I asked for the address. he gave me one in North York, Ontario.

I guess there are different definitions of local. For a business i would say maybe 50 kilometers (30 miles) would be local. North York is 400 kilometers from my house. I told my caller it was six hours drive, which is stretching it, but maybe not if you hit rush hour in Toronto. He was surprised.

So I asked him where he was calling from. I suggested perhaps Kolkatta. He seemed insulted. He said he was calling from the company call center in North York. I asked him where I was. He said Ottawa. I asked what province Ottawa is in. He didn’t know. he did at least know Ottawa is the national capital, which means he probably wasn’t an American.

It was at that point he hung up. I guess he figured out I wasn’t going to let his guys come over to check my hot water heater.

I’m sure if they had come by they would have discovered it needed to be replaced. And they would just happen to have one on their truck that they could sell me at an inflated price. Not that they would tell me the price was inflated, but somebody has to pay for that call center full of people not making sales calls.

I suppose it is possible it isn’t a scam, but a strange business model. But, really, what are the odds of that?