March 7, 2008
by Rosheen Taylor
Well, a funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago.
There was a message on my voicemail from a police officer whose name and station I couldn’t distinguish despite repeated re-winding—you know how annoying that is—asking my husband to contact him because his wife – that would be me – was on her way to hospital after a traffic accident!
Of course, I wasn’t on my way to hospital, and neither had I been involved in a traffic accident. My husband was actually in Barcelona on business. So I immediately rang back the number which, thankfully, I could decipher, and it turned out to be a Connecticut police station.
“You have a wrong ID here,” I helpfully told the station officer. “I’m my husband’s wife and I haven’t been in an accident.”
He wasn’t remotely interested. There didn’t seem to be any record of such an incident and he didn’t know who could have rung. Even my suggestions that either my husband has another wife or someone had stolen our identity didn’t phase him, as if these things happened all the time. Another wife, huh? I was serious, he thought it funny. I pondered the idea for a second or two – you do hear about such things and it’s always those quiet nerdy types—so that must be it, problem solved, goodbye officer and thank you very much. He’ll probably call again, he said, and that was that.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Barcelona . . .
My next conversation, across the Atlantic, went something like this: “Darling, your other wife has had a traffic accident in Connecticut and is on her way to hospital. Would you like me to send flowers, also, a police officer who nobody is able to identify needs to talk to you.”
My dear husband, Paul replied, “He shouldn’t be leaving messages like that,” Well no, it can get you into all sorts of trouble.
“So, do you have another wife, and maybe four more children too, and another five cats and two dogs and a mortgage, is that where all the money goes?”
“I might have,” he quipped in a deadpan voice. Luckily, I have a sense of humor.
Why the lack of interest in this confusion by the police officer? I think it is disturbing and worth investigating why someone else is driving a car that is registered to my husband. We have turned in the plates of three cars in the last seven years – two of them to charities, so what was going on?
Back in Connecticut . . .
Well, a week went by and another unintelligible message was left. Not to be defeated and anxious to sort this out, both of us listened intently to the voice mails, again and again and again. We finally agreed that the name sounded like “Ikon.” I was quite excited when I rang, “Officer Ikon, please.” I was confident, the problem would be solved any minute now. “Which one?” the station officer asked. The wind was taken out of my sails, “How many do you have?” I was nervous but determined At least I had the right name.
But two Officer Ikons? I was beginning to think that this was one of those Candid Camera-type things. So I repeated the whole story, again, and of course, the Officer Ikon I needed to speak to was not on duty until the following night.
How rumors get started
“Didn’t I speak to you last week,” queried the station officer. He might as well have said, “Aren’t you the lady with the husband who has two wives?”
Well, finally early one morning I did speak to Officer Ikon – who is apparently I-a-c-a-h-n, from Derby, Connecticut, and he sounded very nice. It was just a fender bender in heavy traffic, he said. </p