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

My cordless phone is kept on the charger near me. When I'm at home I'm generally wearing shorts these days and I leave the cell in the holster on my jeans. The cell number is only given to a fortunate few and I give them a special ring so I know if they should call. However they're all trained to either call my home number first or call the forwarding number so I can answer it on the landline. My cell is prepaid and it's primary use is emergencies and convenience when I'm out and secondary use is long distance calls. I generally charge the cell when I'm in my vehicle or occasionally when it really needs it I put it on the charger in the house. I'm not a phone addict. Phones are a tool for my convenience and benefit. I refuse to become a slave to them. My landline has talking caller ID so if it rings I'll know if I want to talk to them. If it's an out of state area code, it's not answered if I'm trying to sleep (and most of the time not answered if I'm not trying to sleep). Occasionally a friend will call when he's working nights since I'm often up at night. If I'm expecting a call, I'll pull the phone off the charger and keep it within easy reach, otherwise, even when it's on the charger I can reach it easily with the grabber. I use the phone less and less these days. I used to have a phone in the bathroom but not anymore. If someone calls when I'm on the pot, they'd better call back or leave a message (or both). People know I don't run for the phone. If I'm out getting the mail, in the bathroom, busy with something, etc, I don't answer the phone. I have my priorities and a phone is not high on the priority list. Love the surgically removed usb port line! Keeping that in mind.

So sorry to hear about your father, but nice that you got a final phone call. I can see how that would be comforting. When I lived in Culver City (1989-1994) I had a land line with a phone number that had previously belonged to Larry Welk III, a helicopter pilot for channel 9 news. At this time I mostly used the name Larry instead of Lars because Larry is what my family called me, and that is the name that I identified myself by on my answering machine, which had cassette tapes back then. At one point I started to get a lot of phone calls from companies that wanted to sell me insurance for my helicopter, and this would take up a lot of space on the cassette tapes, which I could not fast forward through at that time. Therefore I changed my outgoing message to say, "Hello, you have reached 310 377-8855, the house of NO LAWRENCE WELK music. If you think you have reached this number in error, take two Geritol and dial again in the morning." The calls from the insurance companies stopped after that. However, when my mother heard this message, it made her mad, and she made me change it because she was a Lawrence Welk fan.