WAG: Perhaps your brain simply misfired on you and performed the inappropriate dialing without raising the attention of your conscious mind?
Well, no…as I said above, I was using the feature that lets me bring up my boyfriend’s name and hit send. No dialing involved. Plus there’s the fact that I don’t know his daughter’s number. 
Without seeing your phone, I’m out of ideas. Take it to your local corporate store if you’re that curious. Did you add your BF’s number into the phone book yourself, or did the guy who sold it do it for you to show you how? He may have put the daughter’s number in the same listing, which isn’t always viewable (ya know, 1 name but a home, cell, and work number for them). Or maybe your call log holds a lot more numbers than are immediately visible. Mine has a couple different ways to get to missed calls, and depending on the route you take to get there, a different number of missed calls appears. The daughter’s number may have been on one of those lists. Or her previous entry on one of those lists was pushed out with the outgoing call to the boyfriend. This one couldn’t be anything other than operator error. No way.
The other 2 instances where a stranger answers and your call looks like it was completed to the person you were calling IS, in fact, possible. In an analog system. That depends on your phone, your location, whether the digital towers were “full” at the time, or down for repairs, or your phone was burping and hopped to analog for no reason, or… could be a lot of different things, but one thing it couldn’t be is the digital system messing up. Since I’m in Illinois and have no idea of your phone or carrier, I can’t be of much more help I’m afraid. If you find someone helpful at a local corporate (stress corporate) store, they should be able to help more. Be careful who you ask though… a lot won’t have patience if you’re not buying anything since they won’t get commission.
As I said, I was definitely the only person who put any numbers into the phone.
Thanks for the ideas, but as of last week I don’t have that phone (or boyfriend) anymore, so I guess it will forever be a mystery. 
Chronos suggested has S’s phone…I can assure you with 100$ certainty that is not the case. I ahve nto seen S in months, since July 4th, which also rules out the prank idea someone else suggested (the fact that my PIN is sometihng he would never know is also a large factor in that, as well.)
I talked with J (who left during my lunh break today, so I showed her the thread) and she is fairly sure she has no 3-way calling. She knows she never set it up, but her phone plan might have it by default. I’m not sure how she dialed the number. I think she jsut hit send (from the ‘n ormal’ screen, as in, what it there when you first turn on the phone) which brings her phone to the list of recently called numbers, then hit send again because she called S twice already, and no one else, so his was at the top of the list. However, it’s also possible she called the number through the phonebook, in which case my number might be after S’s, and maybe she hit some weird button combo that initiated three way calling. But then why did we get S’s voicemail message? And why didn’t he ever get the voicemail message?
I’ll talk with S tonight to make sure he didn’t get the call (I will check my call log to get an exact time) or voice mail.
Oh, and someone mentioned the old analog systems might get mixed up calls, but analog cell service is only in the boonius. Well…I’m IN the boonies, but I checked Verizon’s coverage map, and I’m still in the digital area, so that theory’s out.
About one month ago I was at a friend’s house with my cell phone sitting on the table. After about half an hour, my friend’s cell phone rang, with my call id on screen.
Nobody else in the house, no animals to bump the cell phones, no natural disasters, no evil spirits (that I know of) So - no user error.
She answered, although as soon as she hit talk the phone disconnected.
That one is either number spoofing by some techie joker friend you may have, or is the system running tests. Those happen.
Well, I do know there is a bug with my phone, the LG VX6000, that would explain some of the strange behavior described. I can reproduce it pretty much 100% of the time. It goes like this:
- dial someone in the phone’s contact list (or off speed dial, or the recent calls list)
- realize that’s not the person I actually want to call.
- quickly press end twice to kill the call, bringing the phone back to the normal screen (i.e., the default screen when you flip it open) and quickly hit someone else on speed dial, and press send.
What happens here is that the display will say that I am calling the second person, but I end up getting connected to the first person. It’s like the first call never really got hung up, and when the phone opened up the “carrier” for the second call, it was really continuing that first call.
It’s pretty weird. But it would only seem to explain the first part of bouv’s story, though.
No tech savvy friends that have those numbers… I suppose the system could be running tests, although that sounds a little… stretched. It would be much easier for me to believe individual cell phone fimware bugs that are incorrectly interpreting signals.
Could you have accidently switched phones?
That’s easier for you to believe than a system test? Okay…
Yes, when I see a cell phone mysteriously call another cell phone of it’s own accord from across the room - it’s more reasonable for me to assume that there was a glitch somehow with one of our two phones than it would be for me to assume the Sprint system wanted to make sure that my phone could successfully call her phone, especially given the minute probability that both of us would be in the same room while the system decided to make sure everything was kosher.
So then I guess you’ll never find out that in fact he was forwarding all his calls to his daughter’s phone for some reason. Or that she accidently picked up her father’s phone.
If he was forwarding all of his calls to his daughter’s cell, then wouldn’t Susie have just kept reaching his daughter when trying him again?
If he was 3 states away, how could his daughter pick up his cell at all?
Unless we’re assuming he was lying when he claimed to be three states away.
Actually, when the systems are being tested, they want to complete a phone call just to make sure everything is working the way that it should. Usually it will, at random, pull a completed call out of its call log and attempt to connect it in the same way. If it connects, the system knows its working. If it fails, then obviously something else needs to be fixed. You and your friend were probably one of the lucky random “connected calls” out of the log. It’s like winning the lottery, only no cash prize. Mostly just an annoyance.
Well, I must say, with that explination it sounds a lot more reasonable that this could have been what was happening. I wish you hadn’t told me about the ‘no cash prize’, though… 