Instead of huffing about the annoyance that is automated debt collection calls, I am now shaken each time I get a call and remember the traces - the ghost - that lives inside of my phone. Seeing these photos, though, and reading these articles, brought my thinking back into the human-embodied elements of life and death that technology exists alongside. I don’t claim to exist outside of this construct as I stated earlier on in this post I have personally participated in the rapid consumption of cell phones. A phone without a charged battery is “dead,” they are released in “generations,” and earlier models are referred to, with a sense of owners’ misfortune, as “old.” Concepts like planned obsolescence, hyper-consumerism, and innovation dominate, and user vitality takes a backseat to its technological counterpart. In technology discourse, we often talk about death as it relates to the objects themselves. Put differently, I have a haunted phone number. And the fire's cause may remain unknown because of the extent of the damage.īradley, the former owner of my phone number, died in a house fire only a few weeks before I received my cell phone. The home, valued at $330,000, was a total loss, Kosmas said. But the third roommate, identified as 28-year-old Bradley Holsclaw, died of his injuries the next morning. Two men in the home at the time were not harmed, said Kim Kosmas, a Portland Fire Bureau spokeswoman. SE Portland man dies a day after devastating house fireĪ man died today, a day after inhaling smoke and suffering burns in a fire that gutted a home in Southeast Portland.įirefighters arrived at the home in the 4400 block of Southeast 65th Avenue just after 7:45 a.m. What I found in that search has stayed with me ever since: Over the last few years I’ve begun archiving the voicemails - you can listen to them here.Īt this point in my investigation, two things were clear to me: someone named Bradley used to have my phone number, and Bradley owes somebody a lot of money. The short of it: debt becomes “delinquent,” debt collection agencies can hire debt collectors, or sell the debt to debt buyers,both of which result in these types of calls. The calls came from debt collectors, an industry I was unfamiliar with until I began this detective work. However, after some sustained and attentive listening, I was able to catch the intended recipient’s name: Bradley Holsclaw. Those who were technologically active prior to the iPhone era will likely be able to distinguish the difference in audio quality between then and now. My first step was to figure out who these calls were intended for, which was more difficult than one might imagine.
A few years ago, when I started thinking more critically about technology (an interest that then blossomed into my PhD research), I got increasingly more curious about where these calls were coming from and who they were for. For years, I simply looked at the calls as a minor annoyance, ignoring them and writing off any voicemails as spam. But in the first few weeks of calling this phone number my own, I started receiving calls of a particular sort that persist to this day. My phone number was inherited from somebody else, a man by the name of Bradley Holsclaw.įor most people, the question of their new number’s previous owner would never come up.
However, phone numbers are not actually so individual: they get recycled,maybe even more so than the physical cell phones they’re attached to, which most often end up at the dump. At the risk of coming off cyborg-like, I feel like the phone number is a part of me. I have had the same phone number for almost fifteen years now, which gives me an odd sense of satisfaction given the never-ending flux that defines the technology industry. One thing that’s remained consistent, however, is my phone number. Many phones followed, including QWERTY slider phones, Blackberries, and iPhones. Years later, I upgraded to my first flip phone, which was (if my memory serves me correctly) a Samsung Gusto (also pictured).
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