Several years back, my mother got several phone calls on her cell phone from people (different people, not just the same one) trying to reach Beacon Hill Cat Hospital. I guess that there was only a one digit difference or something, but still, the sheer number of wrong numbers was rather unusual.
Last fall, apparently some guy got a new cell phone, and gave out the wrong number to all of his friends and family. It got to the point that whenever I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize, I’d answer “Hi, if you’re looking for Jimmy, you have the wrong number.” I think the only person who called more than once, though, was his mom, who desparately wanted me to help her somehow find her Jimmy. I’ll give her a slight pass on it, though… I can imagine how distraught a mother must be to not be able to get in contact with her son.
Did he work up a manly sweat, his muscles ripping as he swung the axe, wearing only his denim cut-offs? Maybe you could invite him in for a beer and to watch the game and offer to massage out all the kinks in his neck…
I think the term is “polited to death.” Basically, we can be sweet as sugar, but you’ll never get “in.”
I did this once, and I couldn’t believe it came out of my mouth because this practice really irritates me as well.
See, I was trying to call my sister’s cell phone. The phone list that I was using, written up by another sister, was woefully out of date, but I didn’t know that when I dialed. A man whose voice I didn’t recognize answered.
I’d been having a draining day, to put it mildly, so my brain was not functioning optimally. I blurted out, “Who is this?” I hadn’t been expecting a man to answer!
As the words lefts my lips, my brain went :smack: . To his credit, the guy was super-nice and said cheerfully, “This is Bob. Who’s this?”
I apologized profusely, explaining I had the wrong number. I was completely embarrassed, but he seemed cool about it.
My weirdest wrong number was an irate woman who thought she was dialing “[her] man” at 1am and wanted to know why some chick she didn’t know answered. I told her she had the wrong number, but she accused me of lying. She started carrying on about how she knew her boyfriend was cheating. She was so over-the-top that I started suspecting someone was playing a prank. So I started playing along, saying that I was indeed having sex with her boyfriend and I wasn’t going to stop. She finally screeched that she was coming over and hung up.
None of my friends ever fessed up, so I’m really hoping that it was some prankster dialing random numbers. Otherwise… yikes for the boyfriend!
I have an ongoing “wrong email” saga. Some gal put my email address down when she signed up for classmates.com, so I got updates from them and it eventually ended up on the master list of alumni for some night school. Once I opened my inbox to find a notification for a reunion, followed by three letters from alumni detailing what they’d been up – where they worked, their kids, etc. I replied to the whole list, saying this was the wrong address. The reunion organizer wrote me back, asking if I had the right one. I wish I did.
For several years I received a call at least once a week from an elderly lady asking for her friend, Mrs. Warnell. I’d explain she had the wrong number, and she’d exclaim, “Humph!” and slam the phone down in my ear. Finally I looked up Mrs. Warnell’s number, and it turned out the last two digits were transposed from my number. So from then on when the elderly lady would make her at-least-once-weekly call for her friend Mrs. Warnell, I’d politely explain that she had misdialed the last two digits and she needed to try again. At which point she would still exclaim, “Humph!” and slam the phone down in my ear. 
Then a few years ago we moved and got a new number that had belonged to a man (we’ll call him Mr. Smith) who held a senior position with a Shrine temple and got a LOT of phone calls. After about the 475th such call, we asked a nice lady who’d called for him if she’d do us a favor and call the temple (since we didn’t even know which one he belonged to) and get his new number. She did, called us back with the new number, and we called him up and asked his permission to give out his new number. Turns out it had been his number for 25 years and was printed in many years of temple directories, but he was delighted at our offer to give out the correct number. Which we did; we taped his new number to the phone and would give it to anyone who called. After about six months, the wrong numbers for him trickled off. And then the phone the number was taped to died, and was consigned to the basement in preparation for being thrown out, but somehow we didn’t actually toss it, it just sat there.
Fast forward to over a year later. A woman called from across the country asking for Mrs. Smith. I explained this wasn’t her number any more, but she begged me for the new number. I was getting a bit annoyed till she explained that Mrs. Smith was apparently terribly ill and she was anxious to find out how she was doing. Amazingly enough, I was able to find the number still taped to the dead phone in the basement and give it to her. I’ll never forget her gratitude. It almost made up for all those wrong numbers to start with.
Then there was the time back when long distance calls from Hawaii to the mainland cost a small fortune, and my uncle in Honolulu tried to call my mother in Washington state, a rare event. He got a great wrong number: the Whoopee Tavern.
Well, bless your heart!
After the third call for Cheryl, I explained to the next caller that Cheryl had grabbed a case of beer and a dozen condoms and left. She said not to expect her until about noon tomorrow.
A guy called my cell a few weeks ago looking for another person who isn’t me. I told him he had the wrong number and apologized (I don’t know why I do that). He became slightly belligerent, insisting that my number was on his speed dialer so it couldn’t have been misdialed. It took a few minutes to convince him that he either put it in wrong in the first place or was snowed by someone handing out incorrect digits. He finally accepted that logic, apologized, and hung up.
Whew.
I used to get phone calls for a phone salesman from his new customers who were having issues with services and whatnot. I usually called them back to tell them that they had the wrong number so they wouldn’t get mad at salesman guy for never returning their calls.
Here’s one from the other side…
Back in the mid 80s, before Caller ID, I had a hobby projectgoing, and I needed to find out how much plywood cost. I called (I thought) the local name lumber yard…
Me: “84 Lumber?”
Female voice: “You’re sick!”, and a slammed hang up.
I rechecked the listing, realized I transposed 2 digits, and tried again. I got my info. Then I was fuming, and called my wrong number back.
Me: “I just called here a couple of minutes ago…”
Sobbing female: “I said you were sick!”
Me: “What the hell is so sick about trying to buy plywood?”
Sobbing female: “Huh?”
Me: “I was trying to call 84 Lumber to price plywood, and I get yelled at. I realize now that I got the wrong number. If you want to look, you’ll see that I got your number by mistake after switching digits for the yard in <northeast Indianapolis>. You sound quite upset, and I thought I’d try finding out what is going on.”
She was being harrassed by an obscene caller who always started by asking “You need a lover?” which sounds enough like 84 Lumber that she jumped to conclusions. We talked for about 15 minutes, with me giving her advice on dealing obscene callers.
I wish I knew how it turned out for her.
My first obscene call was because a known “loose woman”/drug dealer in my small hometown used to have our phone number, but after she changed it, we changed ours and got it. I was 11 years old.
Caller: Is Stella there?
Me (trying to be nice and explain): No, she used to have this number but she changed it. Sorry.
Caller: Well, do you wanna go for a fox* like Stella used to do?
Me: Huh?!
Caller: I put you in a sack and ride your ass off.
Me: No thank you. hangs up
Wish I’d been more witty.
*I’ve never heard the term “go for a fox” before or since, so maybe I misheard him, but that’s really what it sounded like to me!
Also, in my small hometown and surrounding areas, we originally had one exchange only, let’s call it 555. Around the time when I was 10 or so, a new exchange was introduced - let’s call it 557 - and when we changed our number to the aforementioned drug dealin’ dame’s number, we got a 557 number.
My name is Lynn. My brother’s name is Mark, and my father’s name is John. We were, let’s say, 557-5928. At the original, 555-5928, there was a girl named Lynne, who had a brother named Mark and a father named John. Lynne was my age, in my class, and I knew her. We kept our numbers though, and dealt with wrong numbers for years to come!
Two good ones stick out, though.
A friend I knew online wanted to call me by surprise, so a mutual friend in my hometown gave him my phone number. Only of course, he said 849. So he called Lynne and tried to convince her that she knew him. “Lynn? It’s Ryan! You know, from IRC! What do you mean you don’t know?! Come ON!” Eventually they figured it out.
And one time I answered the phone and a guy asked for Lynne. When I said, “that’s me!”, he said, “Oh, is this Lynne McDoobilydoo?” I told him no. Then he asked if I was Lynn Reallastname, and I said yes. He laughed and said, “This is Glen, I was calling Lynne for help with calculus, but hey, you’re in my class too!”
A few weeks ago I came home from work and found this message on my answering machine:
“Mrs. Bug, it’s almost six o’clock. We’re still waiting for someone to pick up your baby.”
I’m single. I don’t have kids, I don’t have pets, and my car was parked in the lot outside. I have no idea which “baby” this woman meant. Unfortunately she didn’t leave a name or a phone number. I can only hope she was speaking figuratively. :eek:
My parents were listed in the local phone book, but there was another Robert S---- in town who wasn’t, and we would get calls for my engineer father to come do handyman work. I think finally they got the other Robert’s number and would give it out.
Oh, can I relate to this one! My old home town now has about five exchanges, but while I was growing up and for the first 20 years of my adult life, there were only two: 782 and 788.
After three years away, my wife and I moved back to town, of course signed up for phone service, and were assigned a phone number on one of those exchanges.
The extended Davis family was extremely large, and close-knit, covering four generations. The senior members of the family were two wonderful old ladies, Ethel and Pauline, who were sisters-in-law, and both were aunts to about 200 Davises in and around town.
The phone number we got was the same final four digits as Ethel’s, on the opposite exchange. We got calls at all hours of the day and night for Aunt Ethel.
Finally, we had had enough. We called the phone company, and asked to have it changed, and got a new number, on the other exchange.
Next day, the phone rang. It was one of the Davises. Looking for Aunt Pauline. :eek:
Of all the possible other numbers they could have given us, we ended up with the same four final digits, opposite exchange, as the other Davis matriarch.
We knew when we’d been beat. We started explaining to the Davises who called what had happened, and took messages we relayed on to Ethel and Pauline.
Ultimately either everyone got the message about the wrong number, or the two old gals finally died off, because we stopped getting calls for the Davises.
A few years back I got a message on my machine asking me to come to an elementary school and pick up a sick child. Given that at the time I was a university student going to school halfway across the country from where I grew up, and pretty much everyone I knew was also a student living away from home, it was quite definitively a wrong number. Luckily, they left a number, so I was able to call back and explain the situation. The only problem I encountered then, since it was in Montreal and the message was from a French-language school, was I wanted to be polite and speak French, while the prinicpal wanted to be polite and speak English! I can’t remember who won that one, but we were roughly equal in fluency in our respective second languages, so it wasn’t that communication was going to be easier chosing one language over the other.
You have GOT to be kidding me!
My all time favorite weird message I got on my answering machine was eerily similar to this. But at the time I lived in Soldotna, Alaska.
My message went something like this.
Caller, very irritated entitled sounding voice.
Hello. (very flat and irritated). Your cat is on our fence again. You’d better keep him off or I’m GOING to start calling the police.
Goodbye.
Problem. Neither we, nor our only neighbor across the street from us had a fence of any kind. (we lived along a dirt road about 3 miles long from end to end with only 2 or 3 houses further up the street from us).
Neither we nor out neighbors had a cat. The caller didn’t leave a number so that we could call back and explain this.
We saved the message for quite awhile though, it was good for some laughs.
Wrong numbers, wow! I’ve some stories about them.
The second line in my house (mostly for fax)numbered xxx-4000. Soon after it was installed, I began getting a lot of calls about 1am. Usually I ignored them, but as they kept coming, I started answering and found they were from drunk guys at bars, wanting a taxi to pick them up. Took a while to figure out that a local taxi company number was xxx-0000, and bartenders would tell the drunks to dial xxx and 4 zeroes. Being drunk, a sizable number called xxx-4000 instead.
It soon became tiring, because:
- they always called about 1am, bar closing time.
- they were generally too drunk to understand that they had called the wrong number. (So they’d keep calling back.)
- when they did understand, they got mad and abusive to me.
- and they blamed me for wasting their money in the pay phone. (More than once, they said ‘why the hell did you answer if it’s a wrong number?’ The logic there escapes me.)
I did try just ignoring incoming calls at that time of day. But then the fax machine would answer after 4 rings, so they’d curse for a bit, then hang up and call back repeatedly, disturbing my sleep. So I just answered, assured then I would send my next taxi right out to get them. But since I had no taxis, … A few years later, the taxi company changed to a new number, and after a few months this died out.
That same number, xxx-4000 was also the main switchboard number for a State Hospital for the Mentally Ill and Chemically Dependant, except that it used one of the new area codes added in our metro area. I got a fair number of calls for them, but they were always polite and thankful when I gave them the correct area code.
But sometimes, if I wasn’t home, they got the fax tone. So some doctors offices would just fax their patient records to me. And rather private, confidential ones!
For a while, I was a consultant to the State Hospital system, and received faxed patient records the same day I was scheduled to go out to that very hospital. So I took them with, and delivered them to the hospital. And I suggested they talk to that doctor about patient confidentiality rules.
For a while, my other home phone number was plagued with early teen girls calling asking for ‘Susie’. When I said they had the wrong number, they would just rudely curse at me and hang up. Then call right back, and hang up again as soon as they heard my voice. So I began taking messages, which I promised to give to Susie “as soon as I saw her” (which never happened). Or I said I couldn’t deliver the message to Susie, because:
- we haven’t been able to raise the bail money yet.
- the psychiatrists don’t think she’s ready to leave the clinic yet.
- she ran away with her boyfriend and we don’t know where she is.
I’m not sure what happened, but the calls soon stopped.
Just over 5 years ago, I used to work the the county IS department. The county was remodeling/renovating our office, so several of us were placed in other offices throughout the building that had been recently vacated. The office my co-worker and I were placed in had very recently been the Coroner’s office - they had moved about a month before to a new building, which included a new phone number.
Most of the wrong numbers we got were basically ones asking for the current coroner in office, which wasn’t too terribly bad. I’ll never forget the day, though, when we received a phone call from a very distressed lady… she was trying to reach the Coroner’s office in order to get details ironed out on how to go about identifying her son’s body. I did all I could to help her out. 
I shook for about an hour after that, and my co-worker and I cringed every time the phone rang from that point on.
You do know that most fax machines have options to either turn off the ringer or answer on the first ring, so you hear nothing? If my fax gets a call in the middle of the night, I don’t even know about it unless I see some paper in the outbasket in the morning. Let the wrong numbers call; I don’t care or even know about it.
Yes, I know that, but I sometimes use the fax line as a second line (known only to friends) when I am online on the main phone line. So I have it set for 3 rings, so I can answer it manually if needed.