When I was a kid our number was one off from a local bar. That was always interesting but not quite so fun when a kid would call at one am looking for daddy or mommy.
I usually listen to the greeting on the other end of the phone when I call someone, but sometimes I get distracted by a kid or something right when the other person answers and I miss the greeting. This is when I tend to ask “Is this Local Company?” right after the poor receptionist just said “Hello, Local Company. How can I help you?” I’m not clueless. I just have a child tugging on my pants leg.
Speaking of wrong numbers, a friend of mine moved recently and got a new phone number. She now gets calls all through the day and up into the night for people like Carol, Steve, Mark, etc, there are a good half-dozen of them. Some calls are from collection agencies and even though my friend tells them there’s nobody there by that name and she’s only had this number a few months, they’ll tell her “Come on Carol, I know it’s embarrassing, but you have to own up to your debts.” She finally has to hang up on them. She also gets weird calls with a voice speaking some letters and numbers, like D…V…Q…1…1…7…7. I told her to get a new number!
About six years ago I moved to a different state, got a new phone number. Almost immediately I was getting angry messages on my answering machine DEMANDING to talk to whoever had the number previously. I even spoke to one of the gentlemen (:rolleyes:) personally, even after explaining that this was the number the phone company assigned to me, he accused me of “stealing” it. Then I began to get *threats *on my answering machine, that if I didn’t give it back bad things would be done to me.
Since it was only a week or two old by this time, I just called the phone company, explained, and obtained a new number.
I do this at work. My number is one different from the animal shelter. Some days I get more calls for them than for me. I pass on voice mail to them, too. For that I’ve gotten a direct number that bypasses the question tree.
The flip side, of course, is the business that answers the phone without any kind of identifying information at all. It’s a little disconcerting, creating a moment of did-I-misdial anxiety, to hear “Hello?” when you’re expecting to hear “Thai Garden” or something instead.
We apparently have a phone number similar to at least 3 different businesses – the local detox place (PathFinders), the local free ride van for low-income families (I think it’s MCHRA or some such) and some medical clinic (but this one, I have no idea the name of it). We have stopped answering our phone and just let the voicemail pick up because we know it will go something like this:
Voicemail: Hi, you’ve reached Litoris and family. We are unable to answer the phone right now, but I promise if you leave a message we will call you back when we get a chance. Thanks! <beep>
Idiot: uh, yeh…I done been waitin fer my ride to come an I gots me a appointment at the doctor so you motherfuckers needs to be pickin me up, ya hear?
ALL. THE. TIME.
Once, I happened to look at the caller ID and almost shit myself – it was the local PD. Since my husband was out of the house and so was my (teenaged) daughter, of course, I was more than a little worried. I answered the phone with a nervous, “hello?”
The other end of the line was dead for a minute, before I hear a (I assume) police officer say, “hello? Is this Pathfinders?” I told him, “Oh my gosh, no, this is the Litoris household, I think you mis-dialed the number.” We both laughed and I admitted I was a bit nervous when I saw the caller ID and told him why and he said he was a little freaked out at my saying “hello” – some people do in fact listen, but most don’t.
When I was an evening receptionist for a car dealership, I would answer the phone, “Hello, Local Towne Dodge, how may I help you?” Then the person would place an order for an extra large pizza with mushrooms and sausage and give me their address. I really wish just once I would have told them, “Okay, that’ll be about 30 minutes,” instead of pointing out their error.
My favorite was the evening when a local convict mistook my friend’s apartment number for his (ex?)girlfriend’s. Since he had to call collect, the automated system would dial their number and get the answering machine. In the space to leave message, it would record, “This is the WhateverState Penitentiary with a collect call from pause for real person’s voice PAMELA! PAMELA PICK UP THE PHONE! PAMELA I NEED YOU! I’M LONESOME! end pause Will you accept the charges?” (my friend’s name was not Pamela)
He was very persistent. It seemed he was accustomed to being spurned by Pamela. I don’t blame her.
“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”
Years ago when I had my own apartment before I got married I used to get many, many weird calls on my land line. It wasn’t unusual to get 5-10 hangups and clearly misdirected messages a day. People wouldn’t believe me but I actually wore out several answering machines just from living there.
I wasn’t home a lot so I never really interacted with most of these people directly.
There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern although I do remember a series of calls from what seemed to be a couple of drunks at a bar looking for a friend of theirs.
There was also one persistent older woman representing a bank in another state looking to talk to Mr. or Mrs. Not My Name or Anything Close to It, or Anyone I had Ever Heard Of.
She left several messages with escalating levels of dudgeon that she hadn’t gotten a return call from them before I finally modified my outgoing message:
“Hello, you have reached (my phone number). If you are trying to get in touch with (my full first and last name) please leave your name and a message after the beep. If you are not trying to get in touch with (my full first and last name) please don’t leave a message because YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER!”
I didn’t hear from the confused bank lady again after that.
On and off for a year somebody would leave messages for somebody else. I deduce they both worked in emergency services like EMT’s or something. We got some messages that you really don’t want to hear on your machine.
Some lady missed her hospital appoints for rescheduled surgery, because the hospital left messages over a two day period telling us we didn’t show up and asking why. My guess is she never knew it was scheduled because you have the wrong information.
I’ve had that in person. I was working at a grocery store, and someone asked me where the Walgreens batteries were. “Ma’am, they’d be at Walgreens. This is Dominick’s.”
Yeah, customer service bites - literally. Their shipping department’s probably a safer pick.
I’ve answered the phone this way every so often:
*
Thank you for calling Monsters Incorporated. We scare because we care. How may I direct your call?*
I answer my home phone by saying “Pizza Hut”. People who know me know that I do this and aren’t taken aback. People who don’t know me, and thus shouldn’t be calling me, invariably become silent or start stammering and I hang up on them.
Maybe that was me. I waited and waited once to be contacted by a hospital for a procedure appointment, and finally called the doctor’s office to see what was going on. The very rude receptionist told me that they didn’t schedule me because I wouldn’t answer my phone calls or return their messages. I never received any such things, although they claimed to have the right phone number on file.
Somewhere out there I assume there was a confused and/or irritated person who didn’t want a colonoscopy and wished they’d quit calling.
(neither did I, honestly)
The first phone I had in my name when I lived on my own apparently belonged to some woman that owed everyone within a 20 planet radius money. I would get messages for her all the time, and I finally tried that same type message. The first day I had it, I ended up having to call the police because I got a phone call from someone (apparently fed up with trying to get this deadbeat on the phone) cussing up a storm on my answering machine – telling me that I was a g-d liar etc. The police paid her a visit – I didn’t press charges, I just wanted her to stop calling me – and explained to her just how illegal what she did was and how she did in fact have the wrong phone number and suggested she stop calling. I never heard from her again.
This is the bane of the receptionist. My first job out of school, I answered phones. The script was “Good morning (afternoon), XYZ Institute, how may I direct your call?”
Every. Single. Time. The first thing out of the caller’s mouth was “Is this XYZ Institute?” Naturally I wasn’t allowed to say most of the responses that popped into my head. We got hundreds of phone calls a day. It drove me absolutely insane.
(There was also the crazy lady who called just to rant at me for fifteen minutes – no joke, and remember I had to keep answering a 10-line phone switchboard at the same time – about how she saw one of our policy wonks on the TeeVee and it’s just awful, awful that they call it “ethnic cleansing” because that makes it sound so clean! What could I do? I’d say “Please hold” every 6 seconds to answer the other calls and forward them, and return to her with a “how can I direct your call?” or “Is there someone you’d like to speak to?” but she just kept going, and going, and going… what was she expecting a receptionist to do about foreign policy?? At least she thanked me after she finally ran out of steam.)
What baffles me is I still get this even from clients who call my cell phone, so I know there’s no auto-dialer involved… I’ll pick up and say “hello?” and wait… and wait… and wait… until I finally say “Hello!!” again and they finally twig that I answered the phone 10 seconds ago. WTF?
80 percent of the time, I’m not sure what the person answering has said anyway, so I ask.
Often there might be a specific reason for my confusion, such as:
It was too fast or mumbled
Different people say things different ways
Organizations often have multiple names and different members can use different versions
3.a. A person answering the phone might use the name of a sub-unit or a super-unit of the organization I’m expecting
Phones can be shared
I wasn’t expecting such a quick answer and wasn’t prepared to listen
Sometimes even if I’ve got the wrong place, the person answering has information that would lead me in the right direction
So, if I’m calling you, I’m definitely going to be asking that question.
Anyway, it feels weird just to hang up without explanation. Even if I’m sure I’ve made a mistake, it feels obligatory to go through the. “Oh, you’re not X? Well, sorry then. I made a mistake” bit.
Has she read Stephen King’s short story “1408”? I’d be changing my number awful damned quick if I answered the phone to someone speaking random letters and numbers.
Oh yeah, the fun of misdirected collections. I once had to deal with collections calls for someone who lived in my city and had my name (first and last, anyway, dunno about the middle name). For a while I got completely freaked out that my identity had somehow been stolen.
I found out by getting a message from Credit Card Company, collections department, basically saying what collections says and telling me to pay up or else. Unfortunately, I have an account with Credit Card Company, so I called them back all confused:
Me: What’s going on? I spoke to you guys yesterday, and not only is my account in good standing, but you just lowered my interest rate.
CSR: Is your name Kaio XYZ?
Me: Yes.
CSR: And the last four digits of your SS# are 1234?
Me: No!!
CSR: Oh, don’t worry then.
Me: Did someone steal my identity? Is this going to show up on my credit report?? What do I do?!?!
Took about 5 minutes for the poor woman to calm me down and explain that the different SS# meant that the debt wouldn’t be connected to the real me.
Apparently, people were looking in the phone book for her number, and getting me because I was the only listed Kaio XYZ in Chicago. Why they weren’t using the number she had to have given them to open the account, I have no idea. But she owed a lot of people money. I had to tell a local store I’d never shopped at not to call the police on me because she bounced a check. I really grew to hate this chick.
I also got regular calls from a payday loan company in Florida for some guy named Dennis. For eight months. When my name is on the outgoing message. And I’d had my cell phone number for over 5 years. And I emailed them multiple times (so they’d have it in writing) that I’m not Dennis, stop calling me. Nothing worked, so I ignored the calls until they finally gave up, which took a looooonnnggg time.
