An open reminder: I am not Javier Martínez

My name is Henry. Not Javier.

For a while, I wondered if I might actually be wrong about this. But having pulled past existential identity crisis, I now firmly and unequivocally believe that my name is Henry after all.

I should explain that this all began when I got my first cell phone two years ago. A senior in high school, I felt it unnecessary to carry around a handheld brain-cancer-causing phone in my pocket. I spent seven hours a day with all my call-worthy friends in class, and I could generally wait to get home to have my parents insist I study for the SAT. So I really had little reason to be making phone calls.

But shortly after Thanksgiving, as ubiquitous as they already were, I got a Motorola Razr and settled into life as a chattering mobile phone user.

Cell phones are truly marvelous things. Lumped together with Google and Wikipedia, I am positive history will judge the years before the advent of cell phones/text messaging/pinch-and-pull touch screens as a horribly under-stimulated technological dark age. Didn’t people run late to meetings? How did we communicate with one another? Welcome to the Renaissance, friends. This is history in the making.

There are always bound to be kinks in revolutionary technology, however. And sometimes, the kinks’ll make you want to cry a little.

Sometime into the second week with my phone, I received a phone call from a gruffly voiced man, “Yes, can I speak to Javier, please.”

Me, confusedly, “Sorry, you want whom?”

Gruff man, matter-of-factly, “Javier. Javier Martínez. I want to talk to Javier Martínez. Is this Javier?”

Me, relatively confidently, “Uh, sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

Gruff man, even gruffer, “Listen, you tell Javier to give me a call when you see him next. It is imperative that Mr. Martínez calls us back.”

It’s not uncommon to have someone dial a wrong number. Sometimes it happens as an honest mistake when you mis-hear someone’s phone number, and sometimes it happens when you creep out a girl at a bar and she gives you a fake number. I should have known something was out of place when the gruff man hung up on me.

Over the course of the next several weeks, I started getting phone calls from various gruff men and women all insisting they speak with Javier. It seemed that with my Razr, I had either inherited another man’s old phone number or was unfortunate enough to have Mr. Martinez’s escape from creepy-dates false phone number. The conversations with Javier’s many admirers became more and more bizarre and aggressive the longer I had the phone. They started calling at all hours of the day and night, interrupting the one time of day I hold sacred: my 4 a.m. REM cycles.

And as I made the decision not to pick up calls from unknown callers, they began leaving belligerent messages on my answering machine -which clearly and chirpily reminded callers, “Hi, you’ve reached HENRY.please leave your message after the beep!”

Javier’s well-wishers began insisting he call them back at the risk of legal action and federal penalty. Sometimes, the callers would find interesting ways to pronounce his name: I’d like to speak with Hay-veer Martin-ez. And then what I surmise were his family members, began calling for him too. In heavy accents, they asked to speak with Javier and always seemed confused when on the second or third call in a single day, it was still plain old Henry picking up the phone.

Javier also has an extensive international network. For a few evenings, an Indian family called me. And I exasperatedly shooed them away. And when finally a man speaking Spanish from a laboratory in Florida, insisting he tell me about Javier’s lab results on a sleepy Sunday morning, I snapped and summoned the full-power of my AP Spanish skills.

Usually a very patient person, I unleashed my feeble (a 3 on the AP exam) but stern Spanish and yelled at the poor man on the phone. And one-by-one as the callers called, I set them straight over the course of several weeks. “I AM NOT JAVIER. STOP CALLING ME. I AM #$%^@*!^%$ HENRY.”

The working theory is that Mr. Javier Martinez owes somebody a lot of money. It’s funny how something as trivial as a wrong number can get my insecure self thinking. For all of Javier’s gentlepeople-callers, the man didn’t exist beyond a phone number. And as I happened to be the real person behind the phone number, I guess I became Javier.

For the most part, the calls have stopped, but I do still need to remind the occasional straggler when they call. Friends have asked me why I didn’t just change my phone number, but I believe strongly in enduring such life challenges.

My cell phone contract expires at the end of this month, and I am happily looking to get a new phone. The phone number stays however; tests like these build character.

Henry is a sophomore in business. He would like to meet Javier Martínez.