"Sorry, Wrong Number. Oh, Unless I'm Just A Big, Fat Liar"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

My mom has had the same landline number for like thirty years. Circa fifteen years ago a restaurant opened up in the neighborhood and they were given a really similar number–it’s an easy transposition. So my mom & stepdad started fielding multiple calls per day from people calling the restaurant. They were polite, they redirected people to the correct number for a while, then that got REALLY old and they talked to the proprietors of the restaurant, let them know what was going on and asked them very nicely if they could consider changing their number, seeing as they’d only been in business less than a year and a number change wouldn’t affect them too much? The manager was a dick, basically told them to piss up a rope. So for the last fifteen years, my mom and my stepdad (up until he died eight years ago) have been taking reservations for people who can’t figure out that NO restaurant answers the phone with “hello” and insist on making dinner reservations. I wonder how many people per night show up at that restaurant bitching about their “lost” reservations and whether or not the managers have ever connected the phenomenon to their being snotty to my mom?

The voicemail switch number for TMobile has an LA area code, and I got a call once from some lady in Ohio whose daughter’s friends kept getting some guy on the phone when they’d call her, and would sometimes get calls back from said guy. I checked her account, and the daughter (about twelve years old or so) had messed about with the voicemail settings and had changed the voicemail forwarding number to one a couple of digits off–a number assigned to some poor schmuck in LA. The guy must have been going nuts getting calls from little kids, his voicemail full of messages for little Susie, etc. I fixed it, but I tellya if you ever get a number that’s anything like 805-MESSAGE, better decline it!

42

Larry got your babysitter pregnant and won’t take responsibility for it?? That jerk!

43

Another college story, this time from Junior Year.

From the beginning of the year, I started getting hang-up calls. Dozens a day. I would come home from class and have sometimes 30 or 40 blank voice-mail messages, mostly from different numbers. After a couple of months I finally figured it out (because my German professor had called me, and when I asked her about it she figured it out).

My number was something like 625-3341. The number for the dial-up server was 533-4128 (also made up). The campus phone system worked like this: to dial an on-campus number, you just dial 5-xxxx; so mine was 5-3341. To dial off-campus, you needed to dial 9. The server, being off campus, would be 9-533-4128. Unfortunately, whole legions of students didn’t realize that you still have to dial 9 even with a modem. So their computers would dial 533-41 at which time the system would ignore the rest of the number and call me.

44

I used to have a phone number that was close to the fax number of a local Holiday Inn. One day, this woman kept trying and trying and trying to send a fax, over and over and over. After 45 minutes of the phone ringing and squealing in my ear every two minutes, I hauled my desktop computer downstairs to hook up to the phone line (there was no phone line in the room I had it in, and I had no other way to receive a fax). I got the fax on the computer, and it was an order for a sheet cake. I called the number on the cover sheet to tell the woman that she had been tormenting me for almost an hour. “Oh, really? I was so happy when that fax finally went through!”

Honestly, how many times do you try to send your flipping fax before you give up? And did it never occur to you once in 45 minutes to stand next to the machine long enough to hear that there was a person picking up?

45

My Spanish Professor told me that when he lived in Spain in his younger days his number was one digit different from some local cab company. So pretty much every night he had drunks calling him for rides. That must have been fun. :smiley:

46

Perhaps she was put into the Witness Protection Program?

47

Recently, for about a month, I got dozens of calls asking for room #7043. It turned out that my cell number without area code was the same as the first 7 digits of a hospital in PA and they weren’t dialing 1 first.

Even after explaining their mistake to these people some of them still asked to be transferred to the “right room”. Some of them argued that they had dialled correctly and a lot of them asked me if I could at least tell them how Willie was doing.

It took all my willpower to not tell them “I’m sorry, Willie took a turn for the worse yesterday…he didn’t make it through the night.”

48

My college dorm number was very similar to the local post office. For some reason people like to call the post office at 5 am :eek:

A different dorm room, Friday night about 2 am:
Me (Male): Hello?
Drunk Male Voice: Is Kelly th…<realizes a guy answered>…WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???
Me: There’s no Kelly here, you must have the wrong number.
Drunk: BULLSHIT!! PUT KELLY ON RIGHT NOW!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN HER ROOM?!?!?
Me: You have the wrong number. There’s no one named Kelly here.
Drunk: FUCK YOU!!! I’m coming over there right now. If you’re still in her room when I get there I’m gonna KICK. YOUR. ASS!!! Put Kelly on the phone NOW!!!
Me: click

I hope Kelly dumped the asshole when he showed up.

Don Dokken (of 80s hair band Dokken) lived in Hermosa Beach in the 80s. His number must have been very close to my parents’, because I once got a call for his girlfriend, who had the same gender-neutral name as me.
Caller: Is Chris there?
Me: This is Chris:
Caller: Nuh-uh. Is this Don? Quit messing around. Is Chris there or not?
Me: I told you. I’m Chris.
Caller: No, you’re not, unless you got a sex change. C’mon Don, just put Chris on.

eventually I convinced her that I was a Chris, just not the one she was calling. Then she explained who Don was at great length. I guess she had to tell everyone, including total strangers she got by misdialing, that she knew a rock star.

49

I always try to be real polite to all callers because, well, I just like to. About a year ago I was driving into work when I got a call that wen’t a bit likethis:

****RING ****

Me - “Hello”
Her - “Hi is Sandy there?”
Me - “Sorry Maam, you’ve got a wrong number. No Sandy here. Can I help you with something?”
Her - “<laughing> Not unless you are a caterer.”
Me - “No maam, I work for Channel 9 news. Ya got a good story for me?”
Her - “Well, I’m setting up a party for a tall people’s dating service.”
Me - “Oh REALLY, well that’s interesting… May I get some information from you?”

And the rest was history - a cute human interest story in the can that Friday…

50

When I was in grad school in Bloomington, we kept getting drunken calls for random people, usually loaded college guys calling for girls, VERY late at night. After the first couple I got used to it and had a standard response:
“Hey, is Stacy there? This is Todd.”
“Cool, Todd, wassup? She and Mike are still in the shower. I’ll have her call you when they get out. [click]”

51

This isn’t a wrong-number story, but it never fails to tickle me.

My co-worker came home to find about a dozen messages on his machine. They were all from a woman with a high-pitched, cutesy voice:

“Hello, this is Yosh-click”
“Hello, this is Yoshida from Cen-click”
“Hello, this is Yoshida from Central Bank, your-click”
“Your application fo-click”

And so on. She kept calling and getting cut off after only a few seconds. Finally, it dawned on him what the problem was.

Her voice was so high-pitched she was triggering the fax machine.

52

On the amusing side my mother has frequently called and ranted at ‘that stupid bitch of a girlfriend’ who keeps answering my brother’s phone and not letting him take his calls. No matter how many times I explain the concept of voicemail and answerphone messages she doesn’t get it. :rolleyes:

On the not so amusing side I was working late one evening when my mostly deaf cube-neighbour got a call on her mobile. I waved over at her and pointed at the phone which she quickly tossed to me to answer. It was some guy called Mike (who sounds sober throughout). My colleague is good at lipreading so I mouth the name to her. She looked puzzled so I enquired of a surname. Nope, she doesn’t recognise that guy. So just to be sure I ask if he is calling with a message for Colleaguename. Nope he wants to speak to Joe and am I Joe’s wife? Well I’m polite and explain that he has a wrong number. He tries repeatedly to have me transmogrify into Joe’s wife but I refuse, we hang up and I pass the phone back.

Two minutes later he texted Colleaguename. ‘Hey Joe, your wife wouldn’t let me talk to you. Call me’ :rolleyes: Colleaguename texted him back. I don’t think it was particularly polite cos two more minutes and he’s calling again and fairly bristling with indignation. ‘I want to speak to Colleagename!’ (Yes, he actually remembered her name). He was fairly insistent about it even when I explained again that he had the wrong number and that he could speak all he wanted to Colleaguename but she wouldn’t be able to hear him or reply. He still thinks I’m Joe’s wife btw. Eventually I threatened him with police action for harrassinng a deaf lady and he backed off. But honestly, who hears ‘you have the wrong number’ and takes it to that extreme?

Mike, you are an asshole.

53

I started to post about Shawna & Roger.
Their prescriptions are ready every month on the 5th & 20th. (their pharmacy can’t quite grasp the concept of a wrong number)
Roger’s Alumni Association would still really like to talk to him (Pepperdine Alumni Association can’t quite grasp the concept of a wrong number)
Shawna’s aunt still misses her. (Shawna’s aunt can’t quite grasp the concept of a wrong number)
Shawna’s Citibank payment is late (Citibank can’t quite grasp the concept of a wrong number). In November, I gave up, and started telling them it’s in the mail, since they call every day between the 3rd & 8th of every freakin’ month. She’ll pay it, just not on time.

Then I realized – I’ll get a different phone number at the new house, if we even get a landline, and I’ll never get another phone call for Shawna & Roger! Yay! Moving is fun!

54

From one Japanophile to another, let me just say “how am I not surprised.”

55

Really? Does #-9-0 Allow Scammers to Make Long-Distance Calls on Your Phone? | Snopes.com

56

I bartend, and at night I close the bar down by myself, which means I’m there alone til four or five in the morning.

Phone calls after about 2:30 a.m. are a rarity, for obvious reasons, and they generally alarm me a bit–like what if somebody’s calling to see if I’m still there? So they can rob me or something? If you’re a friend you’d have called my cell.

So unless you announce who you are immediately, I’m generally a bit hostile.

I get a call last month at almost four in the morning.

I say, “Bar X?”

A female voice says, “Who is this?”

Very little irritates me more than people calling me wanting to know who I am. So I say, “Who is this?”

She repeats, “Who is THIS?”

I blithely repeat it back to her.

She starts getting irritated. “WHO IS THIS? WHO ARE YOU???”

I’m irritated myself at this point and about to hang up. “Look, lady, you called ME, you tell me who YOU are and we’ll go from there!”

She snaps, “I got a PHONE CALL from this number earlier tonight, and I think it was my boyfriend calling me, and I want to know WHO YOU ARE!!”

“This is a BAR. I am the BARTENDER.”

“Oh!” Pause. “Sorry…I thought…you know…”

It’s obvious this silly bitch thought her boyfriend was stupid enough to call her from some other woman’s phone, and I would assume he isn’t home yet or something, and she’s on the warpath. Not my problem. So I tell her very brusquely to have a FABULOUS night and then I hang up.

It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who just don’t listen to what you say when you pick up the phone. If it’s anything other than “Hello?” chances are good they’ve called a freakin’ BUSINESS.

57

I once returned to my dorm room to find 7 messages left on my voice mail. This boggled my poor brain–I almost never got messages, and generally when I did, they weren’t for me.

That one day, however, there were 7 messages from the pizza delivery guy trying to deliver a pizza.

Had I been home (and assuming he would have been as persistant), I’d have been tempted to go downstairs and take delivery of the pizza somewhere between call 4 and call 7.

58

When I was young, my roommate and I had a number that was two numbers transposed from a local nursing home. We used to get calls for them all the time, and we were polite, and told people who called the right number. Almost always. But one night, we got a call at around 2:30.

Bitch: “I need to speak to my mother, Edna Plotnik.”

Roommate: “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number. You’re probably looking for Bleak Despair Nursing Care, their number is 123-4576.”

Bitch: “What? Go get my mother.”

Roommate: “Um, this isn’t the nursing home. You have the wrong number.”

Bitch: “Listen, you lazy tramp, I know you’re just trying to avoid doing any work. Now get off your ass and go get my mother.”

Roommate: “I didn’t want to tell you this, but we aren’t sure where she is. She wandered away right after supper. Don’t worry; I’m sure we’ll find her by morning. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go search the neighborhood.”

59

I once had a roommate who answered the phone, “House of God, may I help you?”

60

Years ago I was getting a call from “Grandma” asking me to stop by and do some work around the house. Even though I had my full name on my voicemail, poor old grandma wasn’t getting it. I thought she would figure it out eventually when the kid didn’t show up, or she would actually listen to my voicemail. Weeks passed and she didn’t figure it out, so I finally changed my voicemail to say: This is the voicemail of Khadaji. If this is the woman identifying herself as Grandma, please understand that I have no grandmothers in the area. All others please leave a message.

She figured it out after that.