For some reason, there are a group of people who are constantly calling my home number accidentally. It comes and goes in spurts, but we can frequently get 4 or 5 a day. Usually once we get one call, after we say they have a wrong number they apologize, hang up, and call back again within a minute or two.
Complicating matters is the fact that the people who call only speak Spanish. So we can’t get to the bottom of it through them. So here’s the questions:
What could possibly be the cause of such a consistent pattern of wrong numbers from (apparently) the same group of people? The only thing I can think of is that these guys are calling out of the country and leaving off the area codes. But even if this is plausible, they shouldn’t be making the same mistake over and over again within a few minutes.
Is it possible to do anything about it, perhaps through the phone company?
If you think you have it bad, my number is less than one digit away from the local House of Pizza. (I say less than one, because my number has a number repeated thrice, while the pizza place has it repeated twice, and then the same last digit as my number repeated. Imagine 833-3675 being my number, and 833-6755 being theirs.)
It sucks. Is it possible that they’re trying to dial a number like this, but just have really bad hand-eye coordination? I know that’s what happens with my number a lot. I give them 2 callbacks. If they call me a third time, I just take the pizza order and let them deal with it.
This happens to me from time to time. Apparently, my home number is a few digits off from the local police precinct’s number (not the main one–an office dealing with parking violations or something, as I recall). To answer your questions:
Maybe your phone number is similar to that of a local hispanic business/organization.
Your phone number is horribly close to the other one (one digit off, perhaps something like a 4 vs. 9 so handwriting may come into play, or repeated digits or something like that).
An operator may be confusing your listing with another and be giving out the wrong number (this happens at my business all the time - if you call a long distance operator and ask for listings for my company name in this area code you may get us or a plumbing supply company in Grayling - tho’ they just got a new area code we may be safe now).
Ways to fix:
Request a new phone number from the phone company. (there may be a charge for this)
Get a caller ID and block the callers who call you w/a wrong number. there is also a charge for this service.
Just count yourself lucky you don’t have the phone number I used to have. I used to get hangup calls 24 hours a day, constantly. I was going insane from all the phone calls. Then one day, someone didn’t hang up, he said “oh, I’m sorry, I was just playing a tune on the phone keypad, I didn’t know it would dial a real phone.” My phone number, 354-5333, played “mary had a little lamb.” Finally, an explanation!
So I called up the phone company and INSISTED that they change my number at no charge. After a little badgering, they conceded. I told them they should take this phone number out of circulation and never issue it to anyone, and they agreed.
A few months later, I decided to check and see if that phone number had been reactivated and assigned to someone. And indeed, my phone call was answered. I asked the guy if he had an excessive amount of hangups, and he said he did, and couldn’t figure it out. So I told him the story. And he was really MAD! And I can’t blame him.
I had “call block” on my home phone, which IIRC was a little cheaper than caller ID and didn’t require any hardware or a special phone. Get a call from someone you don’t want to hear back from? Key in a few buttons and they’re blocked! Great for stopping prank callers dead in their tracks, too.
Happens nearly every day, and we have no idea whose fax they are trying to contact. *69 does not usually work in this situation (“We’re sorry, the number cannot be reached by this message”), and we have rollover lines, so it will happen on other lines if our main number is busy. I now have significant upper range hearing loss in my left ear.
When I moved in 1990 to a new city, we got a phone number that, shortly after being connected, was the target of numerous people looking for the local university’s admissions department. Apparently they put our number on their letterhead somehow. It never made sense to me, as the university has the entire 229 exchange, while ours was 967.
Chas.E, if you want to start a support group, I have a friend whose phone number also played Mary Had a Little Lamb. 351-5936. He didn’t have any trouble with people dialing him up just to hear the music, though.
I used to have a phone number that was close to the local pizza parlor in my neighborhood. It was off by one digit 326-3567 versus 326-3566, or something like that.
The first 50 times I was polite, told them it was the wrong number, and referred them to the correct number… but getting calls late at night got a little old, so I did the only reasonable thing I could do. I started taking orders for pizzas. Usually two or three a night on Firday’s and Saturday’s. “It will be ready is 20 minutes!” I would tell them. (Seems like a pizza is always ready in 20 minutes around here).
The person would presumably go down to pick up their pizza and, of course, it was never ready. Eventually the place closed down… I can only hope I played a small part in that.
I wonder if you have phones like the ones where I work(ed). One time when I picked up a call and heard a fax machine, I just did the procedure for transferring a call to someone else’s phone, but I put in the extension for our fax machine. The fax came through and I was able to call the person who sent it and tell them they had the number wrong.
I’ve had the same phone number for almost eight years, and I still get wrong number calls for U-Haul – just had one yesterday. To be fair, the frequency of such calls has tapered off in recent years – I guess people have finally realized that new phone books come out every year.
Back when I was in college, we had a phone number that used to belong to a guy who owned several bars near campus; lots of late-night calls.
Now that I have caller ID, it’s a lot easier to screen out the wrong numbers. Why the phone company feels the need to charge extra for it, when it’s actually more work for them to not pass it along, is a mystery I’d rather not think about right now.
When I was in college I had a phone number that was one different than a popular restaurant. I would get 3-5 calls a week. Usually I would tell them the correct number but sometimes I would take reservations. There was a VERY popular woman who worked there who would get about half of the calls. I would sometimes screw with the guys who called by telling them that she explicitly told me that she didn’t want to talk to them.
My current home phone has the same first five digits as all of the local hospital’s doctor’s phones. Most of those wrong numbers come during the weekdays during business hours so it’s not a big deal. We get lots of hangups on our answering machine along with the occasional addled rambling message from some random 90 year old with a bunch of medical quesions.
My previous home phone was similar to some chick who had a bunch of idiot druggie friends who would call her from parties at 3:00 am on weekdays. One of them told me the number that he was trying to dial so I finally knew her real number. I would get my revenge by calling her and waking her out of her stupor at 7:00 am when I woke up. I’d tell her to tell her moronic friends to stop calling me in the middle of the freaking night.
My company issued cell phone was previously owned by a deadbeat. For the first three months I would get lots of calls from various collection agencies. Most of the time they wouldn’t believe that I really wasn’t Cody Sullivan and that I was trying to b.s. them.
My company desk phone is close to the Department of Fish and Game. I get a lot of arcane questions about hunting licenses.
My advice is to roll with it. It can be kind of fun.
transpose 2 digits in my phone number and its an agency for abused children. So I get calls regularly and just tell them, no thats xy, not yx.
transpose two letters in my domain name and its an ISP in Paraguay. So I get all sorts of misdirected email. If its in english and it looks important, or its gonna make me feel guilty knowing a communication has broken down, or the address is part of some huge cc-list, (i hate that), then I reply and point out the error.
I live in a rapidly growing area and the phone company has been fooling around with the numbers - what a mess. Instead of making the new exchanges (?) different than the old ones they went ahead and made changes like 335 to 355. Drove me crazy for a while and I kept getting the this woman instead of the business I was trying to call. I told her how sorry I was and that I would get the hang of this but would she please take my phone number for now and call me an old time and say, “Wrong number” whenever she pleased.
I don’t think she ever did but we both felt better about being annoyed and annoying.
A guy I worked with started getting calls one day meant for a religious call in radio show. Apparently they had advertised the show somewhere but the phone number listed had a typo. He got no work done that day, he was having too much fun screwing with all the callers. He was giving them off the wall advice for their religious dilemmas…
We once had a phone number that was two digits different than a local drunks-ride-free cab service; problem was, they were the first two digits. The last four numbers of our phone number spelled out RIDE. And that’s usually all the drunk people could remember. So they’d try beginning numbers pretty much at random. Weekend nights and especially holidays were awful around our house.
But we stopped feeling so sorry for ourselves when one of my friends told me that he’d had a phone number one digit off from the local sheriff’s precinct house. He got tons of calls, mostly from people who refused even to listen to his explanation.
As for the OP, my sister-in-law’s parents speak no English. When her mom calls her house and someone answers in unaccented English (and it isn’t a kid), she’ll just say ‘sorry,’ hang up, and call back again in a few minutes, hoping for the s-i-l to answer. (This can be a real problem if neither s-i-l or her kids are at home, since then we get caught in loop that can’t be fixed.) S-i-l taught us the basic Spanish for “She isn’t here” and “She’ll be back at X” and so forth, and even wrote it down phonetically on a pad by the phone. But her mom never gives us a chance to launch into our routine. Anyway, I’m suggesting, rather long-windedly, that something like this may be what you’re encountering.
Or, alternatively, as other people have said, you have number very similar to that of a business that caters to Spanish-only speakers or a private home. Before you change your number, which will cost money, you might want to try corralling a Spanish-speaking friend and getting the phonetic versions of “What number were you trying to call?” and “This is [your number]” and so forth. It may well work, provided your mystery callers aren’t my sister-in-law’s parents. And it would cheaper.
Beyond that, though, you’re pretty much stuck with paying for a new number.
Had a similar problem like this last fall; some real estate agent has some open houses that were advertised in the paper,problem was, when the news paper printed the number they forgot to seprate the phone number and the extension number.Actually they inverted the numbers.
>whoa,earthquake!!!
'kay it’s over<
Umm, where was I?
Oh, so the number people dialed ended up being my home:
*caller:*I’d like to look the house,please me: huh?
After the first half-dozen calls I asked someone why they were calling me and they told me about the ad,I looked it up and sure enough there was my number. I figured out the problem(why couldn’t anyone else?)and spent the next week redirecting people to the other number,til the paper finally fixed the problem.Didn’t even get paid for my services,those bastards!
While some good thoughts have been posted, let me add a couple that are possibilities.
For whatever reason, I get lots of wrong numbers for Helen Brown. At first, with so many of them, I thought she might have had the number before I did; but I’ve now had this number for 15 years. It’s got to be a bad listing somewhere.
About a year and a half ago my telephone’s keypad went south, surreptitiously. It generally worked, but the 5 key sometimes produced a ‘5’ tone, and sometimes another number. My mother’s phone number starts with 5, and I wound up making several wrong number calls to the same gal, who was a bit steamed before I got a new telephone.
Now I don’t know if this is even still possible in the latter days of the digital revolution, but when I lived in Austin in the mid-'70s I started getting a lot of wrong number calls for one particular family (I don’t remember their name, but let’s call them the Garcias). Finally I got a call that I briefly thought was a prank; the caller said, “This is Hector Garcia, have you gotten any calls for me?” It turns out he and I had been assigned the same telephone number and it was anybody’s guess which house would receive a particular call.
That reminds me of yet another phone number debacle of mine. About six years ago I was assigned a pager for work. It was in mid-December. The damn thing buzzed all day. When I would call the number I would get people looking for some guy named Manny and wondering where their delivery was or wanting me to take an order. I was sure Manny was a drug dealer. I’d tell them that I just got this new pager and that Manny didn’t have the number anymore.
After two days I got a page, called it back and reached a very pissed off Manny wondering what the hell was going on. As it turned out Manny was a wine wholesaler and it being mid December it was his busiest time of the year. He had had that pager number for a couple of years and for some reason I was given the same number. Of course I gave up the number and got a new one. Poor Manny lost a crap load of business due to that.
When I was a kid, our number was only one off from the local Humane Society. We’d get 2-5 calls a week usually.
When someone would call and ask if they had any dogs or cats for adoption, my mother would say, “no, but I have a couple of children that are currently up for adoption”.
Thanks mom :rolleyes:
Beatle, that sounds something like the situation my grandmother used to have. She had a two party line. When you wanted to make a phone call you had to make sure the other number wasn’t using it. If they were using it, when you picked up the receiver you could hear their conversation instead of the dial tone.
