Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01Why your desk phone matters
The desk phone looks like office dressing, the kind of prop a sim plants next to the mug, and in Worming from Home it is quietly the most important object you own. The Steam page pitches the whole job in one line: use insider information to illegally game the stock market, and answer the phone occasionally. That second half is not a throwaway joke about pacing. Steve's calls start the promotion thread, his voicemails move the market you trade on, and the handset is how you order flowers for M, get sweet-talked by a scammer, and earn one of the game's silliest achievements. The phone is the plot, delivered in plastic.
The callers are performed, too. The game ships with full English audio, and the voices carry a lot of the comedy: Steve's unshakeable managerial calm, a scammer's grandmotherly sweetness, an emergency dispatcher whose patience visibly thins with every call you make. Treat the phone as a system with a routine attached, not a decoration. This guide covers every call worth knowing about: how to dial, what to check each morning, who is on the other end, what they are offering, and what to do about it.
02How to dial: keyboard and handset
Making a call follows the same rule as everything else on this desk: if you want it done, do it with your body. You work the handset, and you dial numbers through the keyboard, one keybash at a time, exactly the way you enter spreadsheet values. Nothing here is a menu click. Numbers arrive in dialogue, and the game trusts you to keep track of them, which sounds hostile until you realize how few numbers actually matter. In practice there are two: 911, which you already know, and the florist, which you will want to write down.
The ergonomics are part of the joke. The handset is human-sized and you are a worm, so answering involves the same grab-and-wiggle technique as carrying a cup. Community advice mirrors the movement guide: approach short, combine a headbash with the grab, and do not attempt a conversation while balancing on the desk edge. Inbound calls announce themselves loudly enough that you will never miss one for lack of noticing, and the desk is small. Cross it, pick up, and get back to work.
Your first call comes with a tutorial you can miss. Tippy, the Clippy-style narrator, explains each mechanic the first time it appears in the lower-right corner, and his hints do not repeat, so if the handset confuses you for an hour, the explanation already came and went while you were wrestling the receiver. That is the game in miniature: every system is taught exactly once, quietly, and the phone is the system players ignore longest. Expect a slow first call and fast ones after it.
03The morning voicemail routine
The game never forces a morning routine on you, but it absolutely rewards one: wake in the pot, log in, play the voicemails, read the wall calendar, roll the d20. Voicemail comes before tasks because that is where Steve's stock tips land, and tips are perishable. A voicemail tells you a company just won a defense contract while the chart has not moved yet, and the players who trade on it that morning are the ones who touched the machine before opening a spreadsheet. The launch playthrough we studied ran this order every single day, and by late week the voicemail check was the best-paid ten seconds in the game.
Over on the wall, the calendar is the other half of the routine. Orange entries are events, and the market ones double as trading signals: in the opening week the wall literally tells you to invest in the stock market by 7:00 PM on day four. Pin the two sources together. The voicemail gives you the tip, the calendar gives you the timing, and a later Financial Insight perk paints news events directly onto the charts, which is the endgame version of the same habit. Skip the routine and nobody scolds you. The money just quietly goes to the worm who read the wall.
- Wake in the pot, cross the desk, log in.
- Play voicemails first; Steve's tips arrive overnight.
- Check the calendar for orange market events and blue deadlines.
- Roll the d20 before your first task.
- Open the stock app and act on any tip while the chart is still flat.
04Steve's stock tips: flatter him, then trade
Steve is your boss, the admin of your promotion, and the closest thing this game has to an insider feed. Launch-week players settled fast on the lever that opens it: Steve shares more when he feels appreciated. Flatter him in your replies and the tips come out, and the tips are specific enough to act on. In the documented playthrough, two of his calls stood out. One tipped a company that had just landed a defense contract, bullish, a clear buy. The other concerned a phone maker recalling a hundred thousand handsets, spelled something like Tennis in the interface, bearish, a stay-away. That is the entire skill of this market: listen to the man, direction included.
His calls also unlock the market itself. After the L-shaped desk and the signed contract, Steve calls to say you'll be able to trade three different stocks instead of just one, and Tippy celebrates three whole stocks, that's like the entire market. A later call grants full access to the stock portfolio. So the phone is not just the tips line; it is the gate on the trading app's expansion. The promotion chain and the money-making chain are the same chain, and both of them run through Steve's handset.
05Everyone on the line, and what to do
Here is the full call sheet as of the current patch, with what each caller offers and the correct response. Two coworkers never touch the phone at all: Trevor and M run their entire threads through the messaging window, so their beats are keyboard business. Everyone below is handset business. Print nothing, memorize little, and let the table be your switchboard.
When the phone rings mid-spreadsheet, priorities are easy. Deadline tasks have due times; a ringing phone is a ringing phone. No source we could verify documents a call expiring, and the only genuinely time-sensitive phone business in the game is the florist's delivery window, which is measured in business days, not seconds. Finish the cell, then cross the desk. The one exception is the midnight investigation call, which has its own guide, its own tone, and a paperwork errand attached that you should not leave sitting around.
| Caller | What they offer | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Steve, daytime | Promotion objectives, market access, tips when flattered | Answer, agree, flatter; act on tips the same morning |
| Steve, voicemail | Overnight stock tips and market gossip | Play it before trading; buy the bullish news, skip the bearish |
| Steve, midnight | An insider-trading investigation, on record | Say no three times; blaming Trevor is optional |
| Jamie Blossoms, florist | Flowers for M, $20, delivered in 2 business days | Call the morning M asks about flowers |
| Grandma scammer | A sob story and a request for money | Pay her; players report the payoff comes back as a reward |
| Emergency Services, 911 | Escalating patience, then a block | Call once for the bit; keep calling for the achievement |
| Trevor and M | Nothing; they text, they never call | Handle their beats at the keyboard, not the handset |
06The florist and the romance route
M's thread turns romantic through the messaging window, and one of her questions is Do you like flowers? The correct answer leads to the one phone number in the game worth memorizing: Jamie Blossoms, 555-256-7766. A bouquet costs 20 dollars and takes 2 business days to arrive, which is the only real difficulty in the whole route. Order the morning she asks, because two business days is two business days, and the next beat follows the delivery, not your enthusiasm.
When the flowers land, the route continues to a date choice, and the options are a drive-in movie or the soil. Pick whichever worm you are; the relationship follows either way and unlocks the Would You Still Love Me? achievement, currently at 30.7% of players, along with a rainbow skin and a butterfly screensaver. Two phone-adjacent notes while you are here: answer M's first message within one real-time minute and you also collect Wow, You're Desperate at 47.8%, and her birthday is marked on the wall calendar, where wishing her well pays actual cash. Romance, in this office, is a revenue stream.
07The grandma scammer actually pays
Partway through the week the phone rings and it is a sweet-voiced elderly caller with a hard-luck story and, eventually, a request for money. Every instinct from real life says hang up. This is a comedy game about white-collar crime, and the scam call is the pitch inverted: here, the mark who pays wins. Community consensus from launch week is that paying the grandma gives you a reward. We have not seen the amount pinned down in any verified source, so treat the payoff as confirmed and the number as unreported.
What the call mostly delivers is tone. The game plays the whole exchange straight, sweetness and all, while you, an unlicensed invertebrate trading on insider tips, decide whether to wire money to a stranger. Pay her. The worst documented case is that you are out some cash for a joke that lands; the best case is the reward plus the story. And if a guide quotes you an exact payout figure for this call, check where it came from, because the wiki farms have been inventing numbers for this game since day one.
08911: the escalation and the block
You can call emergency services from the desk phone, and of course you can, because the game knows exactly what you are going to do with that capability. The dispatchers take your first call seriously. They take your next one wearily. Keep dialing and the tone escalates from patience to warnings to, eventually, a block: Emergency Services stops picking up, permanently as far as anyone has documented. Being blocked is not a punishment in any mechanical sense. It is an achievement, I Hope You're Happy, sitting at 19.2% of all players, which tells you roughly one worm analyst in five made the same choice you are contemplating.
Strategic note: there is nothing to gain from the calls themselves. No rescue comes, no event fires, the joke is the entire content. So if you want the achievement, take it whenever; 19.2% puts it among the more commonly earned misbehavior awards, just ahead of hanging up on Steve mid-video-call at 18.3%. If you would rather keep your emergency line clean, skip it. Nothing we found suggests being blocked changes anything else in the game.
09Steve's calls gate your shopping
The promotion storyline is administered by phone. Steve's calls tell you what happens next: get the better desk, push the contract paperwork through, make some money and develop that portfolio, then buy the trampoline, the webcam at 3,000 dollars, the soundboard and a framed photo for the final video call. The order is not a suggestion. Buying the webcam or soundboard before Steve's call asks for them is a known progression soft-lock, launch-week vintage, and the developer is working on it. The rule the whole community repeats is simple: the phone says buy, then you buy.
Answering him has its own flavor. Community descriptions of the call interface say you assemble replies from suggested words, strung into a sentence and read out through text-to-speech, which is exactly as dignified as it sounds and somehow suits a worm posing as an analyst. In the final interview Steve expects one-word answers, so enjoy the sentence construction while the week is still casual. And if you decide mid-call that you have heard enough, hanging up on your boss is its own achievement, Ugh, Booooooringgggg, at 18.3%. The game keeps score of your rudeness in writing.
10The phone-first day, in order
Run the desk phone-first and the whole game gets calmer. Morning: voicemail, calendar, d20, then decide whether today's tip is a buy. Midday: tasks and messages, with the handset in reach for Steve's next objective call. Evening: order the flowers early in the week, optionally torment emergency services, and sleep in the pot knowing the machine will have fresh gossip by morning. None of this is required. All of it pays.
The branches from here: the insider trading starter guide covers how to actually trade Steve's tips, the investigation guide explains the midnight call in detail, the relationship guide finishes M's route, and the promotion guide takes over when Steve starts mentioning the webcam. Keep the florist's number behind your eyelids, keep a die parked on Ctrl, and the week runs itself.