I got one yesterday afternoon. It was from a department store chain for Loraine Somebodyorother. I gather Loraine is in a bit of a financial pickle with said chain and has been slow to make amends.
Since this might be a bit too mundane, feel free to throw in your weirdest wrong number calls too.
Well, mine’s not a wrong number, it’s the right number wrong party. As I’ve mentioned in other threads: If Jennifer Peters who used to be assigned the North Carolina phone number now assigned to me would please for the LOVE OF GOD tell her friends, family, coworkers, debt collectors, magazine renewers, doctors, children’s schools, manicurists, and social clubs that SHE IS NO LONGER AT THIS DAMN NUMBER I would be beyond grateful to have that 5 minutes back that I spend EVERY DAMN DAY answering calls intended for her. And if I ever meet her I am going to smack her upside the head.
Last real wrong number? This past weekend:
ME: Hello?
HIM: Trey?
ME: I’m sorry you have the wrong numb–
HIM: Click
This is my oddest wrong number experience (from the 1970s).
Time: 3:00 A.M. on a weekday.
Phone rings.
ME: (groggily) Hello?
CALLER: Hey, this must be Ricky’s old lady, right?
ME: You have the wrong number. There’s no Ricky here.
CALLER: Yeah, but you’re his old lady, right?
ME: Um… no, I am not Ricky’s old lady. I don’t even know anyone named Ricky.
CALLER: Hey, babe, we need some weed, and Ricky sold us some dynamite stuff last time.
ME: Look, you’ve called the wrong number. I don’t know Ricky.
CALLER: OK. (long pause) Got any weed?
Me: Hello
Voice: Wegmans?
Me: Sorry no
V: Sorry too, bye.
Number is not even close.
Last week, I kept getting calls from Discover Card asking for someone who I don’t know. They called me back exactly every two hours, from 8 am to 8 pm, two days in a row. Same routine, a recorded voice would say to “Please hold for an important message” followed by being connected to an operator. At first I told them they had the wrong number, but that didn’t stop them from calling so I just stopped answering.
The most interesting wrong number was a series of calls I got from a guy I only know as “Pete’s Friend”, because he always asked for Pete and never left his name. He only called when I wasn’t home, leaving messages on my answering machine, so I never talked to him myself. One time the message was simply “Pete, I’m in jail, come pick me up.” :eek: Didn’t say where, so even if he reached Pete I don’t know how he’d find him. No hard feelings I suppose, since about a week later Pete’s Friend had tickets to the Firecracker 400 at Daytona and called to invite Pete.
Last Friday I got about 7 or 8 voicemails on my cell from a woman who thought my number belonged to the person her husband was cheating with! They got increasingly frantic and angry as they went on but I think she finally must have realized she had the wrong number because I have not heard one word from her since.
I STILL get calls for Nick and Cynthia (same situation as Jodi) but not hardly as much anymore.
I tend to get a lot of wrong numbers on my cell phone. More than my home phone, at least. Most of the time the calls are from African American people. I’ve had my cell number for a really long time so I’m not sure if I’m one off from someone else, or I have someone’s old number, or there just happens to be a lot of black people who mis-dial and end up with me (I haven’t bothered to keep track of the callers).
My # is one number off from Magnecore, the company that makes high-performance spark plug wires. So, every so often, I’l get a call that says “Yeah, I’ve got a 97 Vette and I need some plug wires, wondering which ones were the best…etc, callme, my # is xxx…”
Usually, I call them to tell them they have the wrong # and give them the right one. I like the Magencore guys, so I try to be nice to them.
Last time I got a new number, the following early morning, we got a call asking for the local psychiatric hospital, Park Center… The number had been assigned to them prior to it being given to us in error. We got calls at all hours of the night and day looking for Park Center and given the nature of their business, it’s scary to think that some of their clients couldn’t find them. It took the phone company a couple of days to correct it and we got another new number. Hopefully, Park Center got their number back.
My weirdest wrong number was at my previous residence. I was used to wrong numbers there, since my number was apparently close to the number of some department at Sears. However, this time, it was a lady calling from France! She actually had reached the number she was dialing, but it no longer belonged to the person she was calling. You would expect, given the expense (this was at least 5 years ago) that once you realized that you had reached the wrong number on an international call, you would hang up right away, but she talked to me for quite a while. She wanted to know if I knew the guy she was trying to reach…of course, I didn’t, and I had to explain to her that I most likely didn’t live at his old address, I simply had his old phone number. (Maybe they do things differently in France, and the phone number stays with the residence.) She gave me his (last-known) address, and I told her that I lived several miles away, so I didn’t know if he still lived there. She was obviously disappointed, but very nice about it. I wished her luck…I wonder if she ever found him.
My current landline number hardly gets any wrong numbers now, but when we first got it, we got a lot of calls from what I assume were collection agencies looking for a certain guy. I’m sure that they did not believe me when I told them that there was no one there by that name over and over and over again. One evening, my husband, daughter and I were doing some yardwork in the front yard when a nicely dressed man and woman drove up to our house. They walked up and asked for that guy! Well, that guy had never even lived in our house! They must have gotten the new address for the phone number they had from the phone company, but they didn’t say so. I guess we were more convincing in person (I’m kind of surprised they didn’t ask to search the house, given how persistent they were!) The calls stopped after that day.
Wrong numbers, you wanna hear about wrong numbers?!?!?
We live in Egypt. For many people, the phone is still a newfangled invention that they’ve only had access to for the last year or so. Phone manners are not widely taught.
Now, if you only spoke Arabic, and you called your Arabic-speaking friend, and a foreigner who only spoke pitiful bits of bad Arabic answered, you’d figure out pretty quick that you had a wrong number, wouldn’t you? That doesn’t seem to compute here. “Mohamed?” my callers repeat, in bewilderment. Yeah, right. Mohamed, who doubtless doesn’t speak a word of English, is right here with me, an English-speaking foreign lady. Sorry, he’s having much too much fun to come to the phone right now.
I try to be polite (we’re guests in the country, after all) but I am amazed at how many people simply will not disengage from the conversation.
The other thing is, once they mistakenly call an English speaker, they often call back to practice their English. Then the conversations go like this:
Ring
Me: Hello?
Caller: Hello, what your name?
Me: I’m sorry, can you tell me who you would like to speak to?
Caller (silent for a moment in what ultimately proves an unsuccessful attempt to process this question): … What your name?
Me: I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number. (In heavily accented Arabic): Malesh, nimra ghralat.
Caller: (giggle).
I hang up, knowing the phone will ring again.
It does. Repeat conversation from the beginning.
We finally had to get caller ID (which is not standard here) so that if necessary we can sic Arabic-speaking friends on some of these morons.
It doesn’t seem to compute over here, either. My Russian is pretty fluent and pretty accurate, but in no way, at any time, could I be mistaken for a native speaker.
About a year ago I had a middle aged sounding guy who repeatedly called my home number and asked to speak to Grandma.
Me: Hello
Caller: Grandma?
Me: No. You’ve got a wrong number.
Caller: Get Grandma to come to the phone.
Me: You’ve got a wrong number.
Caller: I said, get Grandma to come to the phone.
Me: You’ve got a wrong number.
And I hang up.
Ten minutes later:
Me: Hello
Caller: Grandma?
Me: (heaving a deep sigh) You. Have. Got. A. Wrong. Number.
Caller: But I want to speak to Grandma.
Me: Wrong. Number.
And I hang up.
Another twenty minutes or so go by. Phone rings again.
Me: Hello.
Caller: Grandma?
Me: (through gritted teeth) Grandma was never here. Grandma is not here now. Grandma never will be here. There. Is. No. Grandma. Here.
Caller: Where’s Grandma? You’ve kidnapped her! Why did you kidnap Grandma?
This is where I realize that there’s no way of getting it into this guy’s head that he’s got a wrong number. So I hang up and don’t answer the phone for the rest of the day. The whole saga went on for about a month, and then for some reason he stopped calling.
And was replaced by Misha from Kazakhstan, who wanted to speak to his uncle Sergei Viktorovich. For some reason, his calls always got routed to my cellphone, and always, always, always, when I was abroad. He was a nice guy, but always completely amazed that an English person could be in Germany with a Russian cell number.
Oh, if only **Surok ** and I could get our haranging callers to call each other…
My favourite wrong number answering machine message was when I came home and heard this on my machine: “Hey you brown-ass motherfucker call me back!” (speaker seemed to have a spanish accent) I briefly considered having my SDMB name changed from Arnold Winkelried to “Brown-Ass Motherfucker”.
My favourite wrong number call was when a man called me at 6AM (west coast time - maybe he was on the east coast) and when I picked up immediately went into a tirade about how our company was not providing him with the service he deserved and he had a contract to prove it and when were we going to fix it and can we send someone out right away, not tomorrow or the day after, and etc. I tried saying a couple of times “sir you have a wrong number” but he wouldn’t stop talking. Finally he paused and I got the chance to speak.
Me: Sir?
Him: What?!?
Me: If that’s your attitude then we no longer want to do business with you. Please never call us again. click
Thinking back, I feel bad about that, because when he dialed the right number, the poor person at the other end of the phone doubtless did not have a good time.
That might not have been a wrong number. I use one of the biggest personal data search systems at work. On their databases are “neighbors”. Collection agencies like to call all those neighbors to hopefully get the neighbor to go over and shame their neighbor into paying up. They can call neighbors legally for only one reason- to verify location. But most don’t do that- they call and ask for the debtor, hoping you’ll say “Oh yeah, she’s my next door neighbor, I know her well, can I take a message for her” Then they will say “Have her call ACME at 212-555-1234”. You, as their dupe, wander over and trying to be all helpful hand her the message. They then hope she is shamed into calling them and paying up. This is totally illegal, BTW.
I know this is what is happening as I often get “wrong numbers” for dudes I know are listed as my neighbor on that locator service. In one case, the data is incorrect, but they call anyway. In another, I know she is having collection problems, and I can reverse look up the number they give me.
I answered two wrong number calls within a couple of days, last week. They were for different people, so it must just have been a case of fumble-fingers.
For a long time I kept getting calls on my cell phone asking for Yamamoto. Probably he and I have the same number, but different provider prefixes. Fortunately, my phone comes with a ‘reject’ function, so once one of them calls me I can set it to automatically block any further calls from the same number. After about two years, I think I’ve finally shut out all his friends and business contacts.
It was about two weeks ago, at 4:00 AM. No, Tyrone does not live here. (We’ve had this number for three years now, and I specifically chose it because the last four digits spell out our last name. Yeah, I’m a nerd.)
Some years ago, I had a phone number that was one digit off from a strip club. It wasn’t unusual for the phone to ring at, say, midnight, and have a drunk ask how late we’re open.
That wasn’t pleasant, but it was more than made up for by one call I got. “Hi, this is Brandy, your newspaper ad said that you were auditioning dancers…?” I was so tempted to reply, “Yes, Brandy, but our auditions aren’t held in the club. Let me give you my address.”
But I didn’t. I just told her she had the wrong number. Plain ol’ boring me.
Until a few months ago we had people calling late in the night from the US! They were collection agencies, and wanted to talk with some guy or another about some shared property (I think). The guy had a British name, I don’t, the previous tenant didn’t either (the various agents asked if he was the guy they were looking for) and in any case I had applied for a new telephone number when I moved in, and BT assured me it had never been used before.
It would go in this pattern: they would call more and more often, then after a few times they would let me speak with a manager, to whom I explained the situation. The manager would say they would update their records and promise me not to call again. Nevertheless, the cycle would repeat itself after some time; maybe the debt was passed to another agency together with my (wrong) number.
After a few iterations, it seems I found someone actually following up on his promise and I never got those calls again.