The hard part is to convince you that the rest of it—about my role—is true. The trouble is there's nothing about me personally that would help me convince you. There's nothing uncommon about me except that my tastes were previously uncommon.
As I mentioned, I'm a CPA. I live in a suburb of New York City. I have an office in the city. I'm really semi-retired and take care of only a few old business friends, so my listing in the Manhattan phone directory doesn't include the terms CPA or ofc. I have a commutation book and the usual gripes against the NYNH&H. As a matter of fact I'm writing this while commuting and you'll have to blame not me but the roadbed and the rolling stock for any of this you may find difficult to decipher, for really I have a very neat handwriting. Although there's no noticeable pressure of work I stay on at my office after the girl's quitting time. (She still chews gum, but all day yesterday she was humming Bartok's Mikrokosmos.) I balance books until the line at the bottom of the column becomes a bongo board on a decimal point and then I squeeze my eyes and shake my head and go home.
I live alone. I'm a widower. I have one daughter. Thank goodness she's grown, married, and living in a place of her own, so there's no one to tie up the phone. I've given up frequenting the haunts of my old cronies. Though I miss their argumentative companionship I take comfort in the fact that I'm furthering our common interests. I don't give a hang that my lawn needs mowing; let the wind violin through the grass—I'm staying near the phone.
It's between six and seven in the evening at the office and between eight and midnight at home that I receive the calls.
That brings me to your first question—about why I consistently get so many calls when so many people get none.
Let me make it clear at once that even if the polls were buyable or fixable, and I'm not suggesting they are, I haven't the means to buy or the electronic knowledge to fix supposedly random calls. Besides, I'm fairly ethical.
Then what's the answer?
Naturally I've given this phenomenon more than a bit of thought, and I've formulated a theory to explain—at least to my satisfaction—why what's happening's happening. I believe the drawing power of my phone numbers inheres in the nature of number.
Now don't go getting hot under the collar—if you're still wearing collars—before you hear me out.
I'm not talking about numerology or any such mystical hocus-pocus. I'm talking about the psychopathology of everyday life. That's what's skewing and skewering the law of probabilities.