I have a phone line that I use exclusively for internet access, so it only ever has outgoing calls. But of course it has a phone number, that I’ve never taken any heed of, but that turns out to be 1 digit away from the number of a local bank. I realised a few months ago that I’d been paying for voicemail for that line all along, and decided to cancel it, and just out of curiosity plugged a handset in to see if there were any messages. It turns out that a pillar of the local community left a message on it one night in June 2001, about 3 AM, drunk as a lord,and excoriating the bank for refusing him a loan to buy a 7 series BMW, going into considerable slurred detail about his finances, and explaining how all his current loans didn’t matter him given his huge income (which I considered surprisingly meagre).
Over a period of about a month and a half, I got about 6 or 8 phone messages from a guy I call “Pete’s Friend”. I named him that because he always asked for Pete, and never left his own name or number. He always called late at night so I never talked to him myself, either.
Anyway, the best message Pete’s Friend left (at about 3 in the morning) went: “Hey Pete, I’m in jail, you gotta pick me up”. That’s it - he didn’t leave a number or even say which jail he is in. He must have sat there for awhile.
No hard feelings I guess, because a week later he left a message saying he had tickets for the Pepsi 400 NASCAR race at Daytona and wanted to know if Pete wanted to go.
Here in Pittsburgh, we recently had another area code added to cover the suburbs. Last fall, my roomate decided to purchase a cell phone, and the number she received was unfortunately the same number as a loan (or maybe it was debt collection?) agency. However, the agency had received the new 724 area code, but many people didn’t realize this.
As a result, she had to contend with up to 10 calls a day on her phone (which she was using as her primary phone) for the agency. Up until I decided to do some investigating on the Internet, she had no idea what the right number was either, and couldn’t even tell the people what the correct number was to call, so they’d just keep calling back. Finally, she quit answering her phone, except if the caller ID showed that it was someone she knew.
However, she still got 10 messages a day, even though her answering message just said “Hi, this is Elissa. Please leave a message.” The sad thing was, a lot of the people who called the agency were really desperate, so she had to listen to really sad messages about handicapped children and dead spouses before she could erase them. It was really depressing.
My dad’s a lawyer and had an interesting message from a drunk one morning. The guy rambled on and on about something or other and kept repeating the name of my dad’s office as in “What? I never heard of dad, dad, and dad law offices. My lawyers are at dewey, cheatu, and howe. What?”
I myself work at the courthouse and our office got a great message one day. I was from a man who was ordered to undergo anger management counseling. From the message, it was quite clear why.
Once I picked up the phone to a young man asking to speak to someone who doesn’t live here. After he asked me several times if I was sure that person wasn’t there, I said “No, you have the wrong number, goodbye.” He shouted “Wait!” and proceeded to tell me that I sounded exactly like his old girlfriend, that he was in Amsterdam (and really messed up), and he just needed someone to talk to for a little while. I thought what the hell and talked to him for a few minutes, seeing as how it was on his dime and all. We made small talk, and after a while the guy said he thought he was okay now and hung up, after thanking me profusely.
One Sunday night we came home to find a message on our answering machine for Pete, from Kate, about a play rehearsal at 3 (it was nine or so by the time we heard the message) . Kate gave her phone number, but I figured it was a one-off thing, and Pete probably showed up for the rehersal and they got it straightened out, so I didn’t bother to keep the message. But then, every Sunday for three weeks, we got a message from Kate for Pete about play rehersal, except that she didn’t leave her number anymore. I felt a little bit bad about not calling her back the first time!
Shortly after my husband got his cell phone, he started getting text messages.
“hi r u @ the mall?”
He wrote back, “Who are you?”
The response was “brittany”
“Brittany who?”
“u kno, the 1 u called a BITCH!”
“I think you have the wrong number.”
“I kno its right derek gave it 2 me”“My name is [name]. You have the wrong number.”
“Oh sorry 
How old RU? RU cute?”
:rolleyes:
I sometimes get calls here at work for an office in a different division, which has a number one digit away from mine. At least a few of these aren’t misdialing because one verified he had the right number, which he did. I think there was a misprint somewhere that listed that division’s “9” as my “7”. I had to append my voicemail annoucement to include the right number for the other division.
My work number is similar to one of our fax numbers. Good thing that they sound of a fax machine thru the phone never gets annoying 
Every once in a while we get messages for a local glass shop (last 2 digits of number transposed)
As said before , why can’t people figure out if the outgoing message doesn’t say " XXX Glass Shop" … maybe they diald the wrong number!
None of the messages seemed urgent, so we didn’t call them back.
Not quite a wrong number tale, but…At one point, I had a girlfriend who was prone to making prank phone calls (like calling my workplace and pretending to be a customer). I had talked to her earlier in the day–she had a headache, but was going to take a shower and give me a call back so we could finalize plans for the afternoon.
Phone rings, person on the other end asks for me, slightly mangling my name. I say hello back, then pause. That voice sounds awfully familiar.
Me: “I know who this is.”
Caller: “Yes, this is so-and-so from the Department of Education, calling about your student loan.”
–“Oh, that’s a good one! Very creative.”
–“I’m sorry?”
–“Do you feel better after your shower? C’mon (friend’s name), quit kidding around”.
—“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And on for a few more lines, during which I called her “sweetie”. Yes, it was really a hapless Dept. of Ed. staffer calling to harass me about my student loans. Not sure she bought my explanation of what I thought was going on!
A couple of months ago, I got, in obviously male falsetto, “Hi, this is Michelle and I found your dildo, so if you should get this message you should gimme a call back and I can put my <unintelligible> dildo in your butthole. Goodbye.” Apparently (since caller id grabbed the number, I got to investigate) this guy thought he had called one of his friends. Now, I’m not sure why exactly my voice saying, “Hi, this is iconoplast, leave me a message or call my cell at xxx-xxxx if it’s urgent,” didn’t tip him off that I’m not his male friend that he thought he was calling, but hey, he wrote me a nice letter by means of apology.
One morning I switched on my mobile (cell) phone and had the following on my voicemail:
[South London accent]
“Gary, I’m at the shop and there’s no <expletive deleted> bread!
Gary!
Where’s the bread, Gary?
Gary?
Gary?
Are you there, Gary?”
[/South London accent]
3 or 4 messages on my answering machine asking me to refill my grandma’s medicines, as in “Hi, this is Kate from the med room and your grandma is out of Paxil and Verapramil so if you’d bring those by, we’d appreciate it. Thanks!”
No number or name of facility. My grandma’s are both gone…
Then a couple of weeks later…“Hi, this is Kate again, your grandmother, Mrs. Statespoorlady’sname, needs some Acyclovir for her herpes, so call me at Nameofhospital. Thanks!”
I look up the number of the hospital in the next town over and call and ask for charge nurse and say that Mrs. Lady isn’t getting her meds and Kate should worry about confidentiality.
My friend got a call from telemarketers who hung up when they got his machine (or so they thought). It was the supervisor coming on the line to give the telemarketer crap about not pursuing the sale or something, the first part of it was a bit unitelligible. Then it segued into this odd motivational-speaker-new-age-self affirmation sort of thing, with her making all these weird statements about finding the spirit within or something. How this was going to sell furnace cleaning, I’ll never understand. The telemarketer just kept repeating a monotone, robotic “uh huh. Uh huh.” to everything his supervisor said.
Another friend had a number that was one digit different from ticketmaster. That was great fun on a Saturday morning when major concert tickets would go on sale.
At my old job, my voicemail would be filled with weird, drunken ramblings from some woman who kept on moaning “you guys don’t even care! you aren’t even calling me back!” then she’d get angry and spout venom until the message cut off after four minutes. She’d usually call back and continue. Great times on monday mornings with 16 messages left over the weekend.
The last three apartments I lived in had the lobby intercom ring in through the phone. If someone didn’t hang up properly, you’d get a couple of minutes of “lobby time” and all of the fun that goes on there.
I got a wrong number death threat left on my machine once - apparently a drug deal had gone bad. It went something like: “Yo, you bettah come up wit da money [explitive, explitive, explitive]…You da mark”. I played it for my brother - he said "Do you know what “the mark” is? I said no. I guess it means they want to kill you.
I had a phone call at home once from a woman:
Her: “Can I book a taxi please?”
Me: “Sorry you have the wrong number this isn’t a taxi place”
oops sorry hit the wrong button
Her: (really irrately) “But it must be, this is the number I was given!”
Me: (voice dripping with sarcasm) “I think if I owned a taxi company I would know” click.
A weird coincidence story:
I called my mom one night, her phone didn’t even ring and she said “hello.”
Me: “Mom your phone didn’t even ring you must have picked it up fast”!
Mom: “Neither did yours”
Me: “Why would mine ring I called you”
Mom: “No I called you”
Turns out we had both rang each other at the exact same moment, still never figured out who paid for the call!
To make a long story short, courtesy of my boss my home phone number was placed in every drunk tank in this end of the province.
God is that YOUR number???