That is weird.
I have a strange one too.
During the warmer summer months here in California I recieve a call on my cell phone from some automated machine that says:
“The temperature is high. Hello this is telephone number 510-XXX-XXXX. The temperature is high. Hello this is telephone number 510-XXX-XXXX. The temperature is high. Please listen to the sound level for 30 seconds.”
Then I hear alot of static and possibly some kind of faint machinery noises. Then:
“Please acknowledge that you have received this warning.”
The first few times I tried saying “You have the wrong number.” and “Yes” or “No” at this point, eventually I learned you need to hit the 1 key and hold it for a second. Then:
“Thank you. Have a nice day.”
The worst part is if you don’t listen all the way through and hit the 1 key it will call back again, and again, and again. To the point where I have come home and my message folder is full. Real fun deleting 35 or 40 unwanted messages…
At first I was a little paranoid like I was being monitored or unwittingly entering an access code that could vent radioactive steam over all of the central California area. Now I just wonder how I can get it to stop calling.
Well, let’s see. My one neighbour has a Jamaican accent. There is a francophone African church on the corner and most of the parishners have the coolest accents from Rwanda (both in French and in English). My buddy’s wife is Kenyan, her accent is pretty cool even though it’s been diluted for so many years of living in Canada. There is an enormous Somali community to the north of me, there accent reminds me of my buddy’s wife’s accent, but it’s different. There’s also a black guy in my building with a distinct Parisian accent who immigrated from France a few years ago.
Some accents and speech patterns become a lot less prominent through several generations of living in a new location, but they can still be vaguely identified.
One of the guys at the francphone church has a heavy African accent and is as white as the Pillsbury Dough Boy, though.
Okay, that smidge of outrage I’ll give you. Although, someone gets a wrong number so calls the same wrong number from another phone soes sound a little suspicious. I probably wouldn’t have made the leap to “calling a drug dealer”, but it does sound like someone was trying to circumvent a screening process.
That sounds exactly like it is generated by an automatic device once sold by Radio Shack for $99, a Duofone Sensor Alert cat#43-166.
It can be programmed to call up to 4 numbers in succession. It keeps calling them until the battery runs down (if the power is off), or it gets an immediate callback. Since this is 1980’s technology, it doesn’t know who called back (doesn’t have Caller ID) – and this is a weakness in an otherwise good design – so it assumes that any ringback shortly after (within 1 minute, I think) it makes a connection is valid.
It can sense temperature and issue an alarm for either low and/or high (user programmable), sound (like a fire alarm) or anything connected to the normally open aux contacts. The idea of listening in is so you can hear if someone is ransacking your house or an alarm has gone off.
If you call that number anytime (even if it doesn’t call you first), you should get a similar set of voice messages and you can llisten in for 30 seconds (but user programmable).
It does not record messages or understand DTMF tones or speech, so talking to it is useless.
So, the way to stop it would be to call the number back right away “to acknowledge the warning”. It sounds like it is either detecting an overheated establishment and/or someone programmed it badly (it’s pretty tricky).
Note that the voice-prompted callback number is programmed by the user, so it is entirely possible that it isn’t correct. This device cannot be programmed (or reprogrammed) remotely, so if the power is off long enough, it will lose all settings and revert to defaults (which still includes the temperature sensor and listening-in time, but it won’t know where to call).
It’s one of the best gadgets I ever saw in 1980’s for $99, but it isn’t without its faults.
Wow, really?!?
Thats freakin’ weird. I have tried to call the number back but all I get is bree-errrr-eeep “The number you have dialed is incorrect or no longer in service. Please check your number and dial again”.
It would have really spooked me if I had heard talking or real noises when it called…freaky.
I keep getting messages in Spanish for the Venezuelan consulate on my cell. I have no clue how this happened and can’t understand the message enough to make it stop.
I used to get calls for House of Beef all the time, as my number had 5911 and theirs is 5991. A few times people called and directed my machine as to how to cut their recently slaughtered meat. I called them once to relay one of these messages and when I said I had a message on my machine for them, the lady got defensive and said snottily, “What do you want me to do about it?” I said, “Um…take the message?”
I never realized why she was so snotty until now. I guess she thought I was calling to complain about the message. Ah well.
Yeah, really. The monologue you supplied is almost word-for-word what that Duofone gadget does and says. It was a computerized male voice, right?
It sounds like the device was programmed with the wrong numbers to dial and the wrong (spoken) number to respond to. Maybe even the wrong temperature to activate the alarm. Although I admit it’s tricky to learn and use the right way, this one has so many errors, maybe it was set up as a joke?
Do you have caller-ID? If so, I’ll bet the number that shows on CID doesn’t match the one it spoke. Try calling the CID number – as long as it is still connected, powered and turned on, it should answer and run thru the entire litany again.
Just remember – the listening mode is one-way only. It is deaf to your yells and insults.
This has happened 3 times already. I am on the phone with someone I know and hang up. Then not more than 1 minute later the same number from whoever I was on the phone with last, calls me just to be some total stranger calling for someone else from the same phone number of the person I spoke to last. This is very strange and I know it has happened to a friend of mine at least twice. The first time it happened to me my fiancee happened to be out of town. When I hung up the phone with him not a minute later a perky female called me from what I thought was him calling me back. Had my friend not told me about this happening to her, he would have been had some useless explaining to do and been in guiltless trouble.
I got a wrong-number voicemail once from a woman who was apologizing abjectly for her drunken behavior the previous night. “I’m sorry you had to witness that…I’m going to get help…” all that sort of thing. I felt kind of bad for her that I had to call her up and tell her that she’d called the wrong phone number, but luckily she wasn’t home and I left a message so I didn’t have to actually talk to her.
My favorite was back when we were living in Kentucky. The phone rang and Mrs. J. and I picked up at about the same time (on different extensions), she said hello and the female voice on the other end, in an accent redolent of deepest Appalachia said “You better quit messin’ around with mah husband.”
I commented “Ma’am, I think you’ve got the wrong number” and she hung up, never to call back again.
Mrs. J. was not amused, but I thought it was hilarious.
About a year ago, I started getting several fax calls a day on my iPhone. I tried calling the number back, but it just went to a fax machine. That’s when I learned that not only can you NOT block a number on your cell, I couldn’t even turn off the ringer on the iPhone. I had to assign a silent ringtone to that number, but the phone would still beep after the call to alert me that I had missed a call. Uggh.
I used to get calls from people asking me if it was Tuesday Morning. I would answer saying things, no it is Thursday afternoon. It took me a while to figure out there was a store named Tuesday Morning.
Recently I calls on my cell phone trying to get me to switch to Comcast. I didn’t have any luck getting them to stop calling me, so I set their number to no ringtone on my contact list.
When my 9 y.o. daughter got her first cell phone, it got a new number assigned to it. Evidently this number had previously belonged to someone with financial problems. For the first several weeks she’d get at least one call a day from someone insisting on speaking with “Mary” whatever. The phone would ring when my daughter was in school (she finally figured out how to turn the phone off) or in other inappropriate places, always with someone on the other end anxious not to be hung up on by a child. She ended up getting some really nasty voicemails!
I finally called them back to see what was going on, and they didn’t believe I wasn’t Mary! It took me some time to convince them, and I had to go through it with more than one vendor, but the calls finally stopped.
