Jeeper Creeper

We're selling the Concorde in The Auto Trader. The last time I sold a car in The Auto Trader, it sold in 12 hours. That time, the ad was posted at midnight and I had cash from the buyer by noon. That car was a beater. This one's not.

I almost had the car sold before the ad was even posted. Once the ad was on the site and in the 'zine, the phone calls began. One call in particular creeped me out. I answered his questions about the vehicle and asked when he wanted to see it.
"Is the car at your home, at..." he stated my address.

I hadn't given him my address. I paused. He said that he had done a Reverse Look Up on my phone number and that's how he knew my address. He also had directions to the house, courtesy of Mapquest. For all I know, he was already looking at the car using the internet and Google Maps - Satellite. OK, you can't see the driveway on the satellite shot, but it's creepy.

Reverse Look Up gets its information from the telephone directory. As long as our phone number is published in the local book, our number is available to be Reversely-Looked-Up. Even if we requested an unlisted number, our number would still be available on the Reverse site. It's only if we change our status to unpublished that we could be excluded from their database, sometime in the next 3-6 months.

I did a Reverse Look Up on our telephone number, which is silly, because I know where I live. Then I clicked on the 'Find Your Neighbors' option, which, is also silly, because I already know our neighbors. The displayed results did not include our neighbors. It listed people who live on our street, but not the families who are really our neighbors. Which is odder, considering neither of our neighbors has an unpublished telephone number.

Imagine if I chose one of my new-found neighbors and knocked on his front door, (or maybe I should go to the side door? We're neighbors, after all.) and asked him to water our plants while we're away. Then I could explain that I found out he was my neighbor from Reverse Look Up on the internet. Then he could go to his computer and do a reverse look up and find some of his neighbors...

It's like that one Auto-Creeper set in motion a new version of Pay it Forward.

This version encourages Random Acts of Oddness, instead.

A neighbor is someone who can get to your house in less than a minute, and takes 2 hours to get back home. - O. A. Battista


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