I knew the origin of the call because I answered the spam with a special name I'd borrowed by one of my childhood baseball heroes, and entered a rarely used spare phone line as the call-back number. The caller rang this spare line, and asked for my hero.

The telemarketer could barely speak English. But when I expressed even the slightest interest in talking, he transferred me to a supervisor, after explaining that he was "new on the job."

When quizzed, the supervisor said she worked for a marketing association in the outskirts of Los Angeles. My caller ID showed the call originating in northern Virginia. But neither of those was accurate. The call actually came from Mumbai, India, I would later discover.

¶ 10:30 AM