Toronto broadcast host Jax Irwin at her studio in Toronto on Oct. 8. Irwin regularly calls random 902 numbers (covering Nova Scotia and PEI) and tries to keep the conversation going as long as possible with whoever picks up.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
Jax Irwin smiles in giddy anticipation as the phone rings. The probability of someone answering is low. The probability of them staying on the line longer than five seconds is even lower.
So when a “Hello?” comes through, and it sounds like a woman (good), who is a senior (very good), with a folksy inflection that suggests she’s from small-town Atlantic Canada (even better), Ms. Irwin, 36, knows she’s hit the jackpot.
“Hey you!” she trills in a plucky Nova Scotia accent, though she’s calling from a studio in Toronto.
“Hello?” the woman asks again, sounding a little confused.
“Hey you, how ya doing!” Ms. Irwin says, feigning familiarity with this stranger.
“Oh good, I, uh, uh, I can’t hear you. We’re having a torrential rain and thunder and lightning storm,” the woman says.
This is the point at which someone with nefarious intentions might start trying to extract personal information from the “mark” they just called with the goal of stealing their retirement savings.
Ms. Irwin, a broadcast host and digital creator, has purer motivations.
“Well I wanted to check in. I heard you guys are getting buckets of rain!” she says.
She proceeds to make affable small talk about sump pumps and McDonald’s chicken burgers for a minute, and then wraps up with, “I just wanted to check in and you stay dry tonight, will ya?”
A video of this call was posted to Ms. Irwin’s Instagram and TikTok pages in August and has since racked up a combined total of nearly 12 million views. This bit inspired a series – “Calling Random East Coast Numbers” – and has turned into the most successful content she’s created in the last decade.
The metrics caught her off guard. The algorithm rewards angry rants, conspiracy theories and general negativity. But with the backdrop of a loneliness epidemic (one in 10 Canadians said they always or often feel lonely, according to a 2021 survey by Statistics Canada), there’s an apparent hunger for “soft content,” as Ms. Irwin describes it: witnessing two people speaking kindly to one another.
Jax Irwin's most successful calls have all been with Nova Scotian grandmothers, happy to chat about the weather or the ham they're cooking for supper.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Irwin got the inspiration to make these calls on a trip back home to Dartmouth in August, where she found herself unexpectedly moved by the warmth of short, benign interactions with friends, neighbours and strangers. It was such a nice break in the day to have these non-soliciting human interactions, she says, and she realized how rare they’d become in her life.
When she makes these calls to Atlantic Canadian strangers, she looks up numbers in the online version of the white pages and specifically targets the vanishing population of land-line users, who tend to be older and more likely to pick up. In 2019, 85 per cent of people under the age of 30 said they had a cellphone but no land line, compared with 34 per cent of those who are 55 to 64 years old, according to Statscan.
As soon as she hears a Maritime accent on the other line she code-switches to her own lilt, often mirroring the speech patterns of whomever she’s speaking to.
“When I call them I want to sound like Jean down the street,” she explains. She imagines herself as the neighbour they saw earlier in the day at the store, picking up a ham because it was on sale for $1.99 a pound.
“What’s for supper tonight?” she asks one caller, who starts off a bit distant but within a few seconds warms to Ms. Irwin.
“I got ham tonight,” the woman replies.
“Whaddya havin’ on the side?” Ms. Irwin asks.
“Potatoes and cabbage and the whole nine yards,” the stranger says.
Ms. Irwin is channelling her mother, her aunts and all the women she grew up hearing chatting away about what they were cooking, about the storm that was forecast to hit on the weekend or about the friends they got together with for coffee.
By the end of the call, Ms. Irwin’s smile is so broad her eyes have turned into crescents.
“Love ya!” she says to the stranger on the line, as if ending a conversation with her mother.
“Love ya too!” the woman responds. Ms. Irwin, overcome with delighted disbelief, looks ready to cry.
The comments sections on these videos are a rare portal into a gentle, positive internet.
Some viewers confess the clips have made them rethink their aversion to phone calls. Others swear they recognize the stranger on the other end as their own neighbour or mother-in-law. One user asked whether Ms. Irwin would call her, saying she wasn’t elderly but needed this kind of conversation in her life.
But Ms. Irwin disagrees with commenters who suggest she’s doing a public service helping “lonely seniors.” In fact, they’re helping cure her homesickness, she says.
“I don’t think they’re lonely. I think that they’re just straight-up kind and that goes for all Maritimers,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re probably busy, so just to pick up the phone for a few minutes is awfully kind of them.”
Ms. Irwin’s takeaway is we’re desperately craving connection, but we’re loathe to make it.
Many of us keep our phones permanently set to silent mode; if we do notice a call coming in, we often decline it – assuming it’s a duct-cleaning scam or someone posing as a Canada Revenue agent. Even when we notice a missed call from a loved one, we often text, “Is everything ok?” rather than calling them back.
Ms. Irwin says she always prefers a phone call to a text message, but her millennial peers never pick up when she rings them out of the blue.
“I can get a hold of somebody in Cape Breton quicker than I can get a hold of my closest friends.”
Nine out of 10 calls are a failure, but even on the ones where Ms. Irwin is immediately identified as a stranger, “They’re not looking to rush ya off the phone,” she said.
She compiled a supercut of the polite chit-chat she’s made when being told she has the wrong number. That video has netted more than 857,000 views across platforms and plenty of crying emoji reactions.
“I think it’s just warm to talk to somebody, even for 14 seconds, to say you got the wrong number,” she said. “To just have that human interaction of a nice laugh, just to break up the day.”