About twice a week I get a call that caller ID says is a “private call.” When I answer it, a voice-activated recording (female voice) says, “Oops! Wrong number!” and hangs up. Bizarre!
Has this happened to anyone else?
Weird. I’ve never had that happen. The female voice is recorded? Is a WAG allowed here? Maybe the caller is a fax system of some kind which, when it doesn’t hear fax tones, plays the recording?
Every couple of weeks, I get calls from two different numbers. “Is Ken there?” It sounds like an older black guy. When I answer in the negative, I always get a second call from a different number, again it sounds like a black guy…“Is Ken there?” No, he’s still not here! What makes you think calling from a different phone will make a difference? I think Ken may be a drug dealer who doesn’t answer if he doesn’t recognize the number or something. I think I may have stopped them, finally. After trying various techniques including screaming into the phone for them to stop calling me and answering/hanging up immediately, I finally stumbled onto something that works. When I see the number, I pick up the phone and answer it with this: “Is Ken there?” 
They haven’t called back since!
I have an old lady who calls me all the time. Sometimes it’s as much as twice a day, sometimes it’s once every few days, and sometimes she disappears for months. She’s actually my most frequent caller.
All I can figure is that she has a friend or relative she’s trying to call who has a very similar number to mine and she fat fingers it all the time. It’s very annoying and I wish she’d quit doing it, but I’m loath to be too horrible to an old lady on the phone.
Odd. Very odd.
I work for a major cellular carrier in Canada, so I’d probably have heard about it by now if it was happening north of the border. shrug
I used to get wrong numbers on my home line all the time a few years ago. Apparently if you reversed the last two digits, you’d get the number for a “massage” parlour. Boy, did I ever have fun messing around with those wrong numbers once I figured out who they’d meant to dial. 
I got a call the other night:
Me: “Hello?”
Older Woman’s Voice: “Cuckoo-CUCKOO!”
Me: “Pardon me?”
Older Woman’s Voice: “Cuckoo-CUCKOO!”
Me: “Um… I think you may have the wrong number.”
Older Woman’s Voice: “Oh, dear. Is this XX8-XXXX?”
Me: “No, you must have missed the 8, this is XX0-XXXX.”
Older Woman’s Voice: “Oh, sorry. Thank you for being so nice.”
I’m guessing she was calling her kids or some other family where that’s a running joke.
“Cuckoo-CUCKOO!”
Or maybe she was a little cuckoo-CUCKOO.
I’m going to do that to my grandmother. heheh heh
I agree, but I have had to be stern with the woman who calls often from another city and then is confused. Since I have caller ID, I now greet her with “This is the wrong number again. You need to figure out how to stop calling me.” She no longer leaves messages on my machine, and the frequency has decreased about 50%.
It’s always fun when the wrong number dialer refuses to believe that they’ve dialed the wrong number.
The last time this happened to me, I got woken up around 7:30am on a Saturday (I hate when that happens) by a caller saying he was standing right outside my front door, and who told me to quit fooling around and to come open the door to let him in. I got a little freaked out, having only just moved into my house about a month ago, and having noticed that my front door’s doorbell is broken. So I went over and looked outside. Nope, nobody there.
When I asked him who he was calling for, he said, “You.”
When I then asked him who he was, he said, “You know who this is.” Then, in a more threatening tone, “I’m not kidding, man. Open the door!”
It crossed my mind to start playing with him at this point, and to start saying stuff like “Not until you show me what’s in your pockets, turn them out so I can see… Now show me what’s in your pants waist lining, pull them down a bit so I can see…”, but then I realized that even if he had called the wrong number, it would be on his cell phone’s dialed numbers list, and there was no particular reason to antagonize him into looking up my phone number to get back at me, if he was a criminal and vindictive sort. So I just told him again that sorry, he really had dialed the wrong number, and hung up.
Fortunately he did not call again.
Wrong numbers, though mostly annoying, can be good sometimes. I have a really great recipe for grilled pork loin that was left on my answering machine. I also learned a whooooooooooole lot about the sex life of someone I don’t know because she left a very detailed voice message. 
The slut!
The IT team I am on has a rotating duty pager number (single number that forwards to one of our cell phones, everybody gets their turn for a week).
If you dial the wrong area code you get the jail a few miles away.
We get very few technical support calls but plenty of “Hi, I’m trying to bail my friend out of jail” calls. I spoke to a very nice FBI agent for a few minutes before figuring out he had the wrong number.
It’s amusing because I work at a law firm, so some of those wrong number calls sound like they’re legitimately for the firm but somehow got the wrong person (that is, they were looking for one of the attorneys).
WRT wrong numbers, tell me did I do the wrong thing here? Husband says I did.
Was left a message on our answering machine - it was some woman RSVPing for a party and telling the hostess what she would bring. I called her back using the number on the caller ID and left her a message that she had left the RSVP message to a wrong number and explained that I was calling her so she could get the message to the correct person. Husband says this was totally stupid and I shouldn’t have bothered her - I say it was the polite thing to do as the person was RSVPing to a party and was bringing food - it would be nice if the person having the party had that information.
ETA - So was I wrong or right?
I think you did the right thing.
You could always try recreating the old joke…call the number back and say, “This is Ken. Any messages?”
You totally did the right thing. Kudos for being a decent person.
IMHO, you are a good person.
“He “sounds” black? What does a black person sound like?”
See also:
“Oh, sure. It’s a black guy calling, so he must be trying to call his drug dealer!”
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I have a friend who is from Bahstin. She is black. Anytime I hear someone speak with a stereotypic Boston accent, I say, “(s)he sounds black”. Kinda an inside joke.
Ever listen to Mose Allison? He sounds JUST like that.
