So my mobile phone rings today with a number I don’t recognise, but as I’m not the paranoid type (like just about everyone else I see here or among my circle of acquaintances) I ANSWERED the call.
And a lady asks, ‘Is this Amed…no, no, you’re obviously not an Amed’ and I laughed and replied, ‘Nup, I’m Kam…you must have the wrong number’.
‘Oh, so sorry, I betcha that bugger gave me the wrong number on purpose’.
And that was the start of a very long and convoluted conversation, that went from her trying to find Amed, ‘WHO IS A VERY NICE MAN’, me trying to give her instructions to look in the white pages (if she could locate his full name, which she had, somewhere in her BEIGE address book that she couldn’t actually find at the moment) to living in a trailer park and having weird neighbours who think she is spying on them, to how the person who gave her the wrong number ‘on purpose’ is dodgy and she thinks he’s trying to rip her off.
She sounded lucid enough, and didn’t seem to be totally nuts or off her meds, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but wondering now if this is her Saturday afternoon entertainment: ring a wrong number and see how long she can keep a sucker on the line?
When I was around 24, I got a call very similar to that, asking for some guy’s name and wouldn’t believe he wasn’t there (or that I wasn’t him). I finally convinced her and she launched into a “poor me” spiel because he obviously gave her the wrong number on purpose (is there a name for that?)
So she kept me on the line, and I was too soft-hearted to push her away, and we ended up actually being friends for a while. And she was married, but her husband pretty much ignored her. Then I moved to another city, and that was that.
In my case today, someone else (Mister Dodgy) had given her Amed’s number (Amed is a nice man :D), but Amed’s number turned out to be mine. And I’m an Aussie sheila, so my voice bears no resemblance to an Amed’s anyway.
Hope she finds Amed to do some handyman work for her, and shunts Mister Dodgy to the kerb. Oh, except she has to park her car there now because the people next door keep stealing her parking spot in the trailer-park…
Years ago, I noticed that the fancy new bus shelters downtown had a phone in them, so I wrote down the numbers and called up a few times. Seems to me there was at least one conversation that lasted more than 10 minutes, maybe two.
Why would I do that? I’m an Aussie, and we don’t just hang up on people who randomly ring us. Also, it’s Sat arvo here, so I wasn’t pressed for time (except to take the kids and pup to the beach). And anyway, my life was enriched today by my random call from a random woman 2000km away in Queensland who was looking for Amed.
I once had a phone number that had previously belonged to a Mr. James Moses, who had apparently dropped off the face of the earth without telling a lot of concerned friends in Louisiana what happened. The calls were so numerous and so tearful that eventually I talked to one of them, looked in the phone book etc. trying to find local information about him. Nothing.
I was walking down the street one day when I was 19, and a woman pulled over and asked me if I knew where a certain street was. I had never heard of it, and I said so, and somehow 30 seconds later she was asking me if I wanted a blowjob. I’m absolutely 100% serious. Obviously, in hindsight (no, I didn’t do it), that was her plan all along, and asking for directions was simply her entrée. My point, if I have one, is that yes, it sounds like she just wanted to talk, and Amed maybe (probably?) doesn’t exist.
I knew a kid who used to dial directory assistance in the wee hours of the morning just to chat. He actually got the same girl on several occasions and they struck up a sort of phone friendship.
My Dad’s business phone was one digit different from a pharmacy about 15 miles away. Some little old lady called for the pharmacy & when he said she dialed wrong insisted that he answered wrong. :smack:
A couple of years later he was at a wedding & actually ended up sitting at the same table as the pharmacy owners.
My weirdest wrong number was in Spanish. I stumbled through my broken Spanish in return: “Uh, lo siento, uh, pienso que…no tiene usted el numero correcto.”
The response was a torrent of angry Spanish that I didn’t understand, except for the repetition of “El diablo.” I eventually hung up.
Way back when caller ID was a relatively new feature, I got a weekend 3 am call from a very drunk woman. I answered and told her she dialed the wrong number and she began berating me. I hung up on her and she redialed, laughing about how she was going to keep me up. I unplugged the phone, but wrote down the number.
A few weeks later I woke up on a weeknight to use the bathroom. On a whim, I called the number and woke the woman up. I explained who I was and said some nasty shit. I repeated this every week or two, anytime I happened to be awake at 3 am. On my fourth or fifth call she apologized for her original drunken call and asked me to stop. I did.
I started screwing with people who call me for free estimates etc., seeing how long I can keep them on the phone.
I tell them no one will talk to me here, and they give me way too many shots. They don’t take me to the yard but once a week. They make me eat the food. The doctors are mean too.
I’m so glad you called to talk to me…
Hello, hello? Hello.
When I was a kid, we had a phone number one number different from some other family’s, so we got a lot of mis-dialed calls from people trying to reach them. One lady mis-dialed so often that she and Mom started talking and eventually wound up friends.
