Anyone have any ideas for spreading the word to local nurseries without being offensive? There's one in particular right in my area that's across from a high-profile, big selection of Proven Winners, overpriced place. The service sucks, but people must go for the selection. The smaller place is family owned, with good service, but it sells mostly annuals, super-common perennials and shrubs, own-grown and Proven Winners. No one around here sells old roses and this nursery could fill the gap left by Great Lakes Roses if it wanted to and give people a reason to come, or at least cross the street... With its location, the nursery is in a situation to cater to wealthy and very wealthy people (who not only have a lot of rose-growing land and could hire the gardeners to care for them, but would be enticed by the idea of an antique rose, especially because of the history and not everyone has one -- roses as a staus symbol), and also the poor and not as wealthy in my area who also have old and historic homes where such roses would fit right in and low-care would be a big bonus! If this place advertised in the Michigan Gardener (our state gardening magazine), was featured in the paper by a well-known gardening columnist (who would probably love to help) and put ads in the 2 small-town papers and the neighborhood and historic district newsletters, they could easily drum up a lot of interest! Would you write a letter? Go in? What's the nice way to say, "Look, your nursery is boring, most of the traffic is across the street, and there's not much reason to shop here. This might be a little risky, but there is some demand for these roses here that could help your business, you're in a good situation to really market yourself in the area and beyond, and here are a couple of vendors that you can buy from"?

Please - all you Mamma Bears (said with great respect - I'm a mom too) take a deep breath, stand back, and calm down. I have no doubt that that phone call was upsetting and frightening. Your daughter was smart to call you, and I think you were smart to investigate and also for Dad to call back and make himself abundantly clear. If the caller had bad intentions, he now knows that your daughter has a pissed-off no-nonsense male for protection. That can't hurt. But please do consider that the caller may not have had bad intentions. As you noted Bethpen, your daughter was kind to several young men with poor social skills, any one of whom might have made that call without understanding at all how it might have seemed to her... He may genuinely have considered her a friend, and have wanted to reestablish contact and see how her new job was going, and had no idea how creepy it would have seemed. But your daughter's creeped-out reaction may have alerted him to the fact that the phone call wasn't going well, so he declined to give his name for that reason - not thinking how that would make it all even worse... This type of action and lack of insight would be very typical of a young man with autism. This call was a single action, not a series, that was perceived as creepy because it did not conform to social norms. There was nothing threatening in what was said, but the social inappropriateness (that's the nature of the autism disability) created a perceived problem. A mountain out of what could truly be a molehill. At this point there has been one phone call with a message that was inappropriate and yes, creepy, but not actually threatening. Please try and keep that in perspective, and carefully consider the option that it may not have been meant to provoke fear. That said, I do agree with the suggestions to inform HR where your daughter works, and to ask for specific training about how to handle threatening calls. Given the nature of her work, that can only be of benefit. This post was edited by sweeby on Sun, Aug 10, 14 at 14:24

I guess it all depends on how much you call from home versus away from home or on the road. We use pre-paid cellular. The new phones were free after rebate and my wife and I each spend about $5-$7/month for the STI Mobile/Sprint service. We only make quick 1-2 minute calls for necessary reasons and it works fine anywhere in the country that Sprint covers. Voice mail and text messaging are turned off on both cellular phones. Other cellular providers are now joining the pre-paid game with good deals. We are still stuck with the old telephone company for home and home office lines. I must have the reliability and quality of a landline for my business. I do pay too much for long distance, toll-free, and local service for my business compared to the low rates available today. Bills are typically $35-$50/month for relatively low volume usage. The last time I switched was from MCI to Ameritech(i.e. SBC/AT&T/who knows?) It was a pain to switch, but the new lower rates were good for a year before they went up again. Our home phone line just went up to $22/month for local phone service. It started at $18 several years ago. Pre-paid long distance service is $.025/minute using cards from companies like Cheap Phonecards. The latest cards don't require you to enter the pin every time from home and you can program the 800 access number into speed dial. The long distance cards are great from hotels too. We are seriously considering the switch to broadband phone service, but our local numbers are not yet portable for Vonage or the others. We are just outside of their large markets. Broadband cable internet is $30/month and speed is around 300K or 10 times faster than dial-up. It is fast enough for our needs. The total bill (excluding my business) is around $67/month for all phones and broadband for my wife and I. Here is a link that might be useful: Cheap Phone Cards

"In my area, and I believe elsewhere, Tracfone doesn't have any brick and mortar locations." Well, duh. That's why I told Anne to start with Verizon. It is Verizon that actually owns the phone number that was assigned to Anne's Tracfone. Tracfone doesn't own any phone numbers. It leases them from the carriers in the areas where Tracfone "provides service." Calls made from/to Tracfones use cell towers that are owned and maintained by the carriers whose lines Tracfone leases. "I know of and about the tasks you thought you'd snow me with." I wasn't attempting to snow you with or about anything. I was only attempting to find out how much you actually know about the way voice communications work. You say that you (with consultants) set the specifications for systems and equipment that was needed for your office. Big whoop. All that means is that you sat there and said things like, "Well, we need a system that can handle 142 calls per hour with 15 agents taking the calls at any given time. We need a system that can route callers to the agent(s) who are most capable of answering their questions. We need telephone sets on the employees' desks that will let them know who is calling and from what number." You helped establish the minimum specifications for a system needed by the company for which you work. I, on the other hand, determined the needs of the agencies/cities, worked with those agencies/cities to set their specs, and then designed the system that would meet/exceed those specifications. "I was a manager, not a worker-bee. I know of and about the tasks you thought you'd snow me with. There's nothing wrong with being a worker-bee but that isn't what I did." You are so condescending. If you were a worker bee, you would have known that the Caller ID information (which appears to be the root of Anne_CT's issue) is assigned to the line at the Central Office. Being a manager, you know only that Caller ID exists and that it means a person's name and phone number will show up on the recipient's phone. Yes, of course I have heard of ROLM, and I know what a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) is. Did you know that a PBX is actually a computer? Do you know what a trunk line is? Do you know the difference between Automatic Call Distribution and Uniform Call Distribution? Do you know what an IVR is and how it works? How about PRI and ISDN? Yeah, you may have heard of these things, but without doing a Google search you don't really know what they are, how they work, or how to program them because you were a manager and not a worker bee. When someone calls 911 from their home phone, the address shows up on the 911 operator's screen. Even if the caller says nothing, the dispatcher knows where to send the first responders. That's because the address information is keyed into the OE at the CO by a phone company employee. But what happens when a 911 call is originated from a business? If it's Spiffy Dry Cleaners, it's not much of an issue because the address (including Suite number as appropriate) is keyed in. But what happens when it is a business that has multiple telephones throughout multiple floors in an office building? Ever think about that? Absent specific 911 location information for each telephone number in the business, all calls originating from that business will show up with just the business address on the screen of a 911 operator. If that business uses a PBX, the PBX administrator needs to key the information into the system. Since trunk lines are shared lines, this can be a pain in the patoot. Each employee is assigned an extension number, and that extension has to be programmed into the 911 information for that trunk line. And if the employee changes physical offices within the business but keeps the same extension, the PBX administrator has to update the 911 ID information for that extension. If the business with multiple telephones throughout multiple floors in an office building uses, for example, Centrex lines for each phone, and those phone lines are assigned to a specific floor and cubicle or office number, that info would need to be keyed in by the local Telco. Sounds easy enough so far, right? But when someone on the 11th floor of a building in cubicle 136 has a heart attack while working late one night but manages to call 911 from their phone before passing out, how will the first responders know where on the 11th floor cubicle 136 is located? Different states, cities within those states, and even fire districts within the cities, may have their own standards as to how they want the location to be designated. But in my area, the main entrance to the building was the starting point, From there, the building is divided into quadrants, with Q1 being to the immediate left of the main entrance, then proceeding in a clockwise direction so that Q4 is to the right of the main entrance. Think of it this way -- If cubicle 136 on the 11th floor is in the northeast area of the building, "northeast" means nothing to a firefighter if the floor is filled with smoke and no one can tell up from down or right from left. So, for 911 purposes, cubicle 136's location would be designated as --- What? Ah, this all depends on which direction the main entrance to the building faces. If it faces west, then cubicle 136 is in Q2, but if the main entrance faces east, cubicle 136 is in Q4. (And if the building is very large those quadrants may need to be further divided into sub-quads.) Obviously, with the way folks move around within businesses while still keeping the same phone number, most of the time the 911 designation information never gets changed. Gotta hope no one suffers an emergency when no one else is around to direct the first responders where to go.... And it appeared to me that in Anne's case, her phone number was originally a landline assigned to "John Smith" and it carried his name and address as the 911 information, with his name showing up on the Caller ID as the person making the call. Then John ported the landline number to a wireless number and no one changed the 911 information because the number was still assigned to the same guy. Then, when John gave up the number (whether it was by his death and the account being closed, or by any other reason), the number remained a wireless number and no one even thought about changing the 911 information because it isn't usually put into wireless accounts -- because wireless calls to 911 ping off the closest cell tower for routing to a 911 dispatch office. By the very nature of wireless phones, your billing address doesn't matter one iota when it comes to sending first responders. I'm done. I can only hope that Anne comes home happy from her outing with her son to get her issue resolved.