For something like twelve years now, Eddie and I have had the same mobile number, except for the last digit. It’s the kind of thing you could easily mix up - think 2772777 versus 2772772 - and I worked it out after a while, so now I just give people his actual number.
The last year or so I notice he’s started calling himself Edward.
[wipes tear]Our little Eddie has become a man![/wipes tear]
That’s kind of how I feel. And the people ringing him sound a lot more formal. Back in the day, it used to be all 'Howya, ‘zEddie there?’ Usually with loud music in the background.
Sigh…I think Eddie and I are grownups now.
Third-party story here, but fun enough to be worth telling:
(Well, depending on how depraved one is):
Friend had a phone number one digit away from the front desk of some large hospital. So he always got calls meant for the hospital. Often, people wanting to speak to some patient in the hospital. Friend said he always wanted to tell the caller: “Oh, that person died yesterday.”
(Don’t know if he ever actually did that, though.)
ETA: Another story from the same person: He worked at a big university where I was a student. I had a T.A. by the same name. Friend often got calls from students asking if they could have a few more days to turn in their assignments. He always said, “Yeah, sure. Fine with me.” Or at least he told me that’s what he said.
For a while over the summer – like every week or two – I would get a call from someone speaking in a language I didn’t even recognize, although my best guess would be Russian. The caller, a male, sounded VERY angry about something, but of course I had no idea about what. I kept yelling back that he had the “WRONG NUMBER,” but I think he did not understand me any more than I understood him. It was fairly unnerving.
When I worked in a Pet Store a friend told me that she tried to call my house but got a wrong number. The confusing part is that the number was very similar to mine, I think the first 3 digits were different, but the girl who answered had the same first name as me and USED TO work at that VERY SAME Pet Store.
I have probably told this wrong number story before but it is a good example of the genre:
At 2 or 3 am I was awakened by a phone call - I answered and the person said “CC?” I answered “yes … who is this?”
Caller: CC, it’s Mike!
**Me: **um… I know two Mikes. [Neither one of whom would be likely to call me at 3 am for ANY reason]. Which one are you? [It occurred to me it might be a prank so I didn’t want to say “Mike Smith?” and have him say “yeah, Mike Smith! That’s right!”]
Caller (in a terribly wounded tone): CC … you KNOW who this is. It’s so cruel for you to pretend you don’t know me. Please, please, don’t treat me this way!
This went on for a while, during which I politely tried to convince him he had a wrong number and I really did not know a “Mike” that could possibly be him. He got progressively more frantic and tearful, saying how desperate he was for me to just ACKNOWLEDGE him (as if he was my lovelorn ex, and I had decided to completely cold-shoulder him). Finally I gave up and hung up. (I contacted both Mikes the next day and both knew nothing about the call.)
The really strange this is that something like this has happened to me twice in my life, separated by about 2 years time, and once while I was living in Virginia and once in Massachusetts. The other time it was a woman who asked for me by my full, real name (which is very common and I was in the phone book) and said “CC, this is your Aunt Ruby.”* She then proceeded to get frantic and threaten suicide when I gently told her it was a wrong number, I didn’t have an “Aunt Ruby,” and I was not the “CC” she was looking for, just someone else with the same name.
I know it was just a similar prank both times, but it makes me wonder sometimes if I had an alter ego running around breaking the hearts of older women and young men …
I live in a hispanic-centric area, and I don’t speak Spanish. I always get wrong numbers from people speaking spanish, who refuse to believe that 1. they have the wrong number and 2. I don’t speak spanish.
Happens with texts, too; last week it was someone convinced I was the contact who wanted to buy weed. Wouldn’t stop texting me, kept saying someone else was going to buy it if I didn’t want it.
Wish I had a funny punch line but that’s about it. Next time I’ll come up with some witty reply. 
My daughter’s cell phone number used to be for a Jesus Gonzales (pronounced hey-Zeus for those of you not familiar with the Hispanic pronunciation). We used to get constant wrong numbers for him, from people who didn’t understand that they were getting a wrong number.
Then one day, an automated calling machine called. Reading the name, it pronounced Jesus at Gee-Zus. So as it was going through its script, it was saying:
(I press 2 as I’m giggling under my breath.)
(I’m now laughing so hard, tears are coming down my face.)
Then my wife asks, “What do they want?” Barely able to reply, I say, “They want to find Jesus!” :D:D:D:D:D
Every year or so, I’ll get calls from people looking for a man with an Arab or Persian name. So far, they’ve come from a charity asking about the car this person wanted to donate, some social-services agency, and I think some employment service I’ve never heard of. They don’t call back once I’ve told them that I have no idea who called them. These calls seem to follow a cycle where I’ll get a bunch over a few days, then none at all for quite a while. I can’t decide if my Semitic friend is an idiot with a bad memory or someone trying to prank me. I’m not annoyed or inconvenienced by these calls, but I feel bad because whoever it is is wasting the time of the companies who call me to find that he’s given them a bad number. When they first started happening, I called my carrier, who told me that my phone hadn’t been cloned, and the relative infrequency of the calls seems to indicate that it’s one person giving out my number as his own. Weird.
I do!
I had a really long conversation once from someone with the wrong number… ended up flirting with him for about 45 minutes. I should add that I was 16 years old at the time, and being goaded on by friends. Probably not a really smart move, but it seemed harmless at the time.
I am recalling relating this story here before, but that was some time ago, so here goes:
Several years ago I started getting wrong numbers calls from people looking for a local diving shop. Some people left very long messages on my machine with minute details of what they were looking for in diving expeditions, even though in my answering recording all I said was “This is xxx-xxx-xxxx, please leave a message.”
I eventually figured out what was happening. My number and the diving shop’s number are identical except my last two digits are 4-5, and their last two digits are 5-4; for some reason people were transposing the last two digits when they wanted to call the shop and instead getting my phone.
The number of messages being left on my machine got so bad I changed my answering recording to something like “This is xxx-xxx-xxxx. This is NOT X Diving Shop. If you think I am X Diving Shop, call the number again, but this time end it with 5-4.”
Even after changing the recording I still got some messages for the diving shop, but eventually they stopped and I changed it back to just say “Please leave a message.”
My husband was getting a bunch of collection type calls on his cell for someone with a totally unpronounceable name. He told them again and again that they had the wrong number, but they would not stop calling. He even called them and asked for a supervisor, who promised to correct their records. Still kept getting the calls. Every other day, I think it was.
So one day because he was driving, I answered his cell and it’s this collection place again. I explain that it’s a wrong number and she says, Ok I’ll change our records.
We’d been told that so many times by then that I didn’t believe it for a second, so I told her, no you won’t change your records. What you will do is call us back the day after tomorrow and ask for this guy again. And frankly, this conversation is starting to bore me. So I have a better idea.
Let’s just go ahead and take this relationship to the next step. How are the kids? Hubby doing ok? That sort of thing.
My husband was laughing and finally she started to chuckle too. I then suggested that maybe we could swap recipes next time.
They finally quit calling. Just as I was making a friend. 
I know this post is four years old, but it piqued my interest and I Googled it. It’s actually a pretty interesting device.
I answer the phone at work, so I get wrong number calls a lot. Our main lines don’t have call display, but some of the back door ones do. I get a call on one of the call display lines from Philip Brittan, who promptly and politely says, “I’m sorry, I’ve dialed a wrong number” I reply, as I do to most wrong numbers, “No problem” and hang up. But then he calls back a couple of times over the next few days, and I start to wonder why he keeps calling the same wrong number over and over, so instead of answering the phone in my usual way with the company name, I simply say hello. Then I get the prerecorded marketing spiel. Annoying calls, but I was impressed by the technology.
I bought a new phone, when working in China, and was putting in numbers of my colleagues. I put one in and sent her a text asking what all the explosions and people running in the streets was about (fireworks - it was a National Workers Day).
Unbeknownst to me I’d entered the number with the last digit wrong. I got a reply asking who this was. “JustinC, your new colleague”. This confusion went on for several messages. She was a student in a University on the other side of a city of 12 million people. We started texting each other pretty much every day, met up and started dating. 
The zoo I used to work in had a name similar to a local holiday park, so we’d often get phone calls asking if we had room for a big mobile home- quite often, the staff just said ‘yeah, loads of room’, assuming it was just someone checking they’d be able to get in to the car park- until we realised how many people were actually after a reservation in a camp site, and were now going to show up without one, assuming they didn’t need one. Oops.
They also had a number very similar to the local doctors- think 573098 rather than 573398. We didn’t get so many ones for there, but I always wondered how many people called them, or the holiday park and asked stuff like ‘Have you got monkeys!?’
We were one transposition from a pizza place. We’d get drunk calls for pizza, and tell them that they had the wrong number. Frequently we would IMMEDIATELY get a call from the same guy again, so fast that they had clearly hit redial rather than punching the numbers correctly. In this case, we would simply take the order and tell them it would be 30 minutes.
I’ve had three “cycles” of wrong numbers on my cell phone. My number has a bunch of repeating digits - there are only three different numbers in it, and one of them only shows up once. It’s easy to think you remember it. I assume this guy had a very similar number.
About a year after I got it, I started getting two sets of calls for the same person. One was his friends, most of whom didn’t speak English. They wanted to talk to me in Spanish. Luckily, I had a lot of co-workers who were fluent in both, and let them explain the mistake.
He also opened a business with my number. It took a while to track this down. I was getting phone calls from companies that wanted to sign me up for credit card processing. Over time, I was able to get enough information from the callers to figure out what was going on. A few of them were caring enough to tell me where they got their phone lists.
Someone used my number for an order for an online printing company. About once a month, I’d get a call telling me my account was overdue, and I had to pay immediately. The first and second time, I told them I didn’t have an account with them, and they said they’d remove me from their list. The next few times, I told the person I was having trouble with customer service and wanted to speak to a manager. They transferred me, and the new person said they would remove me from the list. The fifth time (I think), they finally did take me off their list. I guess. I haven’t heard from them in three months.
-D/a
Well, I do. For real. She’s 94, and lives in Indiana.