Yeah, that would be annoying. The situation might be different if you looked at her, opened your mouth as if to say something, then didn’t. Sort of like calling, but then not leaving a message, eh? 
I have voicemail. For every person who hates callbacks, I’d warrant there’s three who hate leaving messages. JMHO.
For me, Caller ID is great. I use it to screen telemarketers or people I just don’t want to talk to right then. I have an answering machine and if they have a message they’ll leave it. Simple no? If people have an urgent need to contact me they will also have my cell number.
Calling people and harrassing them because your number is on their caller ID is childish, egocentric and a wee bit paranoid. I understand there are exceptions to every rule and the possibility exists that someone is trying to monitor your activity/burgle you or whatever but the fact is, most of the time, strange numbers that decline to leave a message are simply misdialed.
If you don’t have an answering machine and strange numbers on your caller ID are causing you that much distress, they can purchased cheap but adding voicemail to you phone service is probably cheaper.
No voice-mail. No Answering amachine
Some mod would scold me. In any case it looks like you’ve grown out of that stage 
I’d lob another insult at you to get you to $14.95 but I have a tough time getting pissed on a Friday afternoon, ya know.
Agreed but for what ever reason - panic, concern, curiosity - some people will dial back to find out why. A simple, “Sorry, I misdialed” or “I don’t know but I’m sorry if you were disturbed” doesn’t cost you anything and politely satisfies their question. Since you don’t know if the other person is dealing with problems that could be any number of things like -
phone harrassment directed at them
Burglers
their spouses lover tring to call
missing kids or family members
expecting packages for delivery
medical test results
It’s not going to kill you to tell them that you misdialed.
As for The Mermaid’s situation. If anyone acts like an asshole to you for any reason they don’t deserve your courtesy.
Exactly – it’s all about the Caller ID nuts and their insatiable curiosity. It’s everyone else’s job to satisfy THEM.
And if people hate leaving messages, that’s their problem to deal with. (Hint: It’s the 21st century and you may occasionally have to leave a message on someone’s machine. Get over it already.) I’ll bet they can overcome this terrible handicap if the need to leave a message is important enough.
Okay, is this evil or amusing? If I’m not in some hurry, when I reach an answering machine and it’s clear from the message I reached the wrong person, I leave strange messages. Not threatening strange, just wacky – the idea being to maybe amuse whoever hears it.
Like, I used to say I was setting up sales calls for the Murphy Painting Company, and if you called back we would paint a 4 foot by 4 foot swatch of your exterior walls in your choice of the following six designers colors (followed by some random artsy sounding colors) absolutely FREE!
Lately I’ve shifted to selling shares in snail breeding farms. A venture sure to take off, you see, now that patriotic Americans are boycotting French bred snails…
A few people have actually called back. If they seem annoyed, I just say, Sorry, must have been drunk. If they seem to be playing along with the joke, I invite them to our New Year’s Day open house. Regardless of what time of year the call is made. Hey, we really do hold that party each year, and a few more attendees with senses of humor are fine by me.
They probably aren’t thrilled about being called back to explain a call they made 3 days before and didn’t care enough to leave a message about or call you back about.
I never call back numbers I don’t recognize, unless you left me a message that leads me to believe you might actually have been from the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol.
You don’t leave me a message, I don’t give a shit who you are. Even if you do leave me a message, if I still don’t know who you are and you didn’t clearly identify yourself & why you want a call back, I still don’t give a shit who you are and you can bloody well just call me again. So likewise, if I call you and don’t leave a message, don’t bother calling me back 'cause it was probably a wrong number or I just changed my mind about whatever it was.
Now if someone leaves a message that sounds important and they clearly have the wrong number, I’ll call them back to let them at least know their important message isn’t getting to the person they think it is. I’d hate to be the cause of a great love affair or job opportunity being missed. “Hi, George? This is Sue and I’m at the airport and if you don’t call me back in one hour I’m going to assume it’s over between us.” Yeah, I’d call her back. “Honey, I ain’t George, but good luck and all that.”
Because I love thinking that people spend time calling me for absolutely no reason at all.
Three days later? How out of touch with people do you suppose I am?
I too have always been baffled by those who call back. Especially if it’s an out-of-area number. Now this might not hold true for everyone everywhere, but on my actual handset/phone when you hit automatic redial, it doesn’t include that all important 1 in the front. So, to return a call, you either gotta write it down first or, if applicable (which I suppose may be the case a lot) get it off a separate CID box. Therefore, you could have lots of folks calling back misdialed numbers to other misdialed numbers if you transposed something or simply scribbled it wrong. Then the chain could continue. They’re not there, so you don’t “leeme” message (God, that thread was a hoot!) and that person is exactly like you, but aren’t any better at transcribing stuff and so on and so on. 
We could all end up wasting time over nothing but getting wrong numbers. Perhaps then there would be a war though. Or would it be over that?
Ok. Here’s my questions though to these folks…
1.) What do you say when you do that? I think that part is important. Most people here seem to take umbrage at the abrupt demand of “WHO IS THIS?!” the minute they answer. Being confrontational to someone who doesn’t know you nor remembers right off the top of their head about this incident, isn’t a very polite thing to do in our society. Now, if you don’t behave this way then I wouldn’t have any problem, although I still think the onus should be on the initial caller rather than the called. (Oh, and I’m never rude to those that do this anyway. I always offer, regardless of their attitude, a polite “Oops! I made a mistake.” etc. for an explanation.)
2.) For erislover: You mentioned wondering about companies calling you. See, I don’t quite understand how this might work, definitely if it’s a multi-line establishment. If I get a call from an 800 number with no message, then try it to see what whoever wanted out of 4500 employees and a receptionist answers that’s on the first floor of a twelve story building, not having a clue what they wanted isn’t going to help me out in any way. Furthermore, when I’ve called from work, it’s always been imperative to leave a message, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to work on whatever is next and I couldn’t count that as credit (for lack of a better term) towards my workload for that day. Plus, it gave you a record of your efforts. It’s hard to put notations into the system that you called but just didn’t want to leave a message if possible. Yep, I can see it now… “I called Mrs. Hightower, but hung up when the voicemail picked up. Yes, this is the 45th call I’ve made to her this month and she apparently works during our hours. However, I HATE awful those things, they are a blight on humanity, I tell you! So I’ll just keep trying until someone else works the account or she can deal with collections.” :smack: If it is truly important, you would think, certainly in an economic environment, they’d have their best interests at heart.
3.) BubbaDog brought up the ‘casing the house’ scenario. I agree that it could potentially be used to find out when people are home or not, but I have to wonder about several things.
[list=a]
[li]They probably would remember to block the number. I realize there are lots of Darwin types out there, but what are the odds?[/li][li]If they did call and NOT block the number, do you think they’d say anything other than it was a misdial? And if that’s all they chalk it up to, do you keep a log/record of all these indefinitely to positively match them up in case this event occurs? Or has someone said “Oh my God, you found me out! We were going to rob your house and rape your cats, but now that you know who we are from CID, we won’t and instead will voluntarily go turn ourselves in”?[/li][li]Lastly, what about all the people who don’t pick up anyway? Or have the ringer turned off because they’re asleep/have a sick infant/whatever? Or are an agoraphobic like me who’s taken the dog out to potty at the same times each day? I mean, using who does or doesn’t repeatedly answer the phone as a guide for when to break in seems to be a pretty slip-shod method IMHO. They may be there and they simply do. not. pick up. I think living wondering about that would be more stressful than just letting it go. And if you don’t know how to be warned of it in the first place… YMMV though.[/li][/list]
In conclusion, if my hypothetically shy daughter was dying to know if she made the soccer team and I hadn’t heard by when I was supposed to, I’d be calling until I got someone if they didn’t have a way for me to ask them to get in touch with me. If I was the coach and could detect said child was this way, I’d call until… well you get the drift. But I am curious to know how y’all handle or reply to the above. Enquiring minds and all that.
What? You never go out of town for the weekend?
You should get out more. 
With prepaid cell phones now available at reasonable prices, there’s no reason at all why people like us (who hate phone calls) should have to have a land-line at all.
I’ve got a Virgin Mobile pre-paid phone - I spend less than $20/month on it, and my parents and my boyfriend have the number. I’ve never been so happy with non-phone-service in my life
It works for catching up with my family, and the “hey, I’m at the store, what do you want for dinner tonight?” calls, and everyone else can just fuck off. I don’t want to to talk on the phone to them anyway.
The fact that someone dialed your number is, contrary to your obsessive beliefs, not evidence that they had important reasons for doing so.
I’m in the group of people that thinks calling unknown missed numbers back is mostly weird. And most of the times it’s been done to me, the caller has been rude and/or confrontational about it, rather than accepting the fact that people occasionally dial the wrong number.
Here’s an idea: when someone calls to ask you why you called them, tell them you had found their number on your caller ID and were calling to find out why they called you.
OK, you guys win. If I get a call from somebody who says I dialed their number I won’t politely reply, “sorry, I may have misdialed”.
I’ll just tell them to fuck off. I’ll try to be pissed about the fact that they interupted my life.
I have a cell phone with no voice mail, and it occasionally goes off while I’m in class. If the number is my phone book, then the name shows up, but a number of my friends use more than one number (cell/landline), and occasionally it’s my doctor’s office or my landlord or whatever, so I generally try to call people back.
In my defense, (a) if I had voice mail, I wouldn’t bother with this because y’all can leave a damn message, and (b) when I *do[/d] call back, I usually start off with “Hi, this is Daerlyn, someone tried to call me from this number a few hours ago,” and let things go from there. I do get a lot of “No idea what you’re talking about,” and “Sorry, wrong number,” in which case I just reply “Sorry to bother you,” and hang up.
Not all companies have 800 numbers, and when you call back any of the block of numbers they have you still get routed to the same place. I thought I mentioned it, but when I prepurchase a video game I get a call when the game arrives. That is important to me to know. The game company has no real motivation to keep me informed three times a day, besides which, it is an automated line from texas that calls anyway!
Lordy, I wish most of my customers felt this way. I get more hang-ups on my VM than I can stand. I wish I had CallerID at work so I could call them back.
Again: important is a relative term. What might be important to me might not be terribly important to the person trying to get in touch with me.
Now that’s the best damn idea yet! I’m surprised that I didn’t think of that already.
Now I can’t wait for the next time I get one of those calls.
If fact, maybe I’ll misdial a few numbers and hang up before they answer… j/k
Nah, don’t do that…
I think faithfool’s got it right. It’s all about the initial words of that conversation. We’re looking for people to recognise that your calling back a strange number to satisfy your own curiosity, therefore, (if apologies/explanations are meritted) the onus is on the “CID event investigator” rather than the other party. I’ve politely explained my misdial to other CIDei’s. But. I’d have to admit my polite-o-meter starts counting down rather quickly…