According to this documentary, a “Bruce”. But I’m skeptical; what would that lot of Pommies know?
A dude is a bloke in Strine (Australianese).
Bruce (or Bwuce) is regarded as a stereotypical gay bloke’s name.
See what I get for trusting Englishmen? From the 1970s no less.
I’ve had the same TN on my mobile since 1994. The past 3 years or so I receive calls for a business that is one digit off from mine. Many of these calls go directly to voice mail. I especially enjoy the irate callers who leave numerous messages. Needless to say the second and third complaining of no call back. I called the business to listen to what they say when they answer. It is a voice tree with numerous options. My message is the generic default. When I answer I just say hello. I am amazed by the number of callers who RUDELY ask me who I am. WTF? Who am I? I’ll tell you who the heck I am. I AM the phone calling etiquette person. When YOU are CALLING and I answer the next thing out of your mouth best be:
May I speak with (whoever)
Is (whoever) there?
Or something of that nature. But when I very sweetly say Hello. Don’t you dare get immediately nasty and ask me who I AM.
All the callers are not nasty. This past week a very sweet voiced caller (at 5AM.) Asked if she was reaching XYZ company and I said no do you realize what time it is? She was so apologetic, she needed to call out sick. I told I’d been up for hours I was just teasing and wished her a speedy recovery.
I’ve had the same TN on my mobile since 1996. I was able to pick the number out of a list, and I picked a number that seemed “normal” — not one that began with 801, e.g. Later, the next number sequentially became available so I snagged that for my wife. My number ends in 8, and hers is identical except it ends in 9.
Fortunately our numbers aren’t (apparently) similar to any business numbers,
you may not have the same problem we do up here with tele-spammers, but after the third “Hello, this is Heather from ‘Credit Card Services…’” call, one tends to get irritated. it isn’t paranoia as much as it is not having the energy to play whack-a-mole with spoofed caller id numbers.
growing up, our phone # was one digit off from an apartment complex a couple of miles away. which means every so often we’d get a wrong number call for them. a while later, when I was looking for an apartment, I settled on that complex. I called to make an appointment for a showing, and when I gave them my call-back number (the one-digit-off one) she said “Really?” in an amused tone. I responded “yep; you know how many calls we’ve received over the years trying to reach you?”
See, nowhere in that documentary do they say “a Bruce”. In fact, Bruce says, “Is your name not Bruce? That’s going to cause a bit of confusion. Mind if we call you Bruce to keep it clear?” In other words, “Bruce” is a proper noun, a name, not a word that means an Aussie bloke. The documentary merely implies that just about every male in Straya is named Bruce.
Her grandkids bought finally programmed all her important numbers into her phone.
(She told me all about it in an email, to that group she won’t taken my address out of no matter how many times I reply that I am not her “J666”.)
That was good, very good. Don’t call me though…
Ahh yes, wrong number follies.
Years ago we used to have an 800 number coming into my wife’s home-based business. Say 800-234-5678 for this thread.
An Indian tribal casino that advertised heavily to the retiree set used 888-234-5678 as their toll-free number. This was not too long after toll-free numbers first expanded beyond 800-xxx-xxxx. So the idea of 888 was real new. Naturally we got lots of calls from the elderly wanting to reserve a room. Most were apologetic when we explained. Some had to call back twice to get it.
One old jerk would not listen. He got pretty hostile that we were trying to cheat him out of the advertised deal on the TV. So eventually we relented and took his reservation. And to sooth his upsetness, we upgraded him to the Presidential high roller package with the big top-floor suite and plenty of comps. Just check at the concierge desk when you arrive. 
That 800 number of ours was cursed. In those days New Mexico (a place loaded with smart well-informed people if ever there was one) was all one area code: 505. Dominoes pizza had just gone to centralized telephone ordering and they heavily advertised their statewide ordering number: 505-234-5678.
If some clever New Mexican dialed 800-234-5678 instead they got us. We lived in a later time zone. We took a bunch of pizza orders from jerks or drunks who refused to listen.
My current mobile number is an anagram of the number for a local dentist specializing in “pain management.” I get a decent number of calls from drug seekers. Thankfully they know the doc keeps normal business hours so I don’t get bugged at odd hours.
Every once in awhile I get a call from some guy who insists I called him. I can’t help wondering if this isn’t some type of phishing scam.
I had my phone for over five years now, despite that I still get calls for the guy who owned my phone number before me.
A buddy and I were roommates in West Texas back in the 1970s. The apartment we moved into turned out to have a working telephone already installed. However, we did not know the number. The landlord did not know the number. So we could use it to call out, but no one could call us. Then one day not too long after moving in, we were sitting around when the phone rang. !!! I answered it quickly, and a man on the other end asked for so-and-so. I said there was no so-and-so there, at least not anymore, but what number did he dial? Right about then, a third party picked up the phone. It was the person the caller was looking for, and he lived down the street. It turns out the previous occupant had tapped into this person’s phone line! We got it all sorted out, although that meant we lost that line and had to get our own phone, with bills and everything.
I frequently get spam calls from all over the country. Some of them have even been engineered to resemble closely my or the wife’s numbers. So I generally won’t answer a call unless I know the number, but sometimes I’ll call back just to see. The last couple of days, I’ve been getting calls from, according to a Google search, a number in Hilo, over on the Big Island. I called the number back a couple of times but just went to voicemail with no indication of who or what the number belonged to. So today I left a message saying if they called again, please leave a message, and if they called again and did not leave a message, I would block the number. A short while later, the number called me again and this time left a message! Some guy saying it was funny, because he had never called me, while I had been doing the same thing I described, calling but not leaving a message. Said I could call him and we could try to figure out what was going on. I went ahead and blocked the number.
This is totally the tactic in US spam calls for the last couple of years now. Especially for mobiles, but landlines get it too.
If your number is 234-567-8901 then most spam calls directed at you will seem to be from 234-567-xxxx, where xxxx could be any 4 digits.
It’s useless to harmful for you to block that number because it really is some real phone in your area. Which might later need to call you for legit reasons.
Meanwhile, odds are you won’t get more than one call from a spammer using that random 4 xxxx’s. The next call will be from a different xxxx.
I still have a mobile number from the area code where I used to live. That’s handy. Everyone I’ll ever need/want to talk to in that area code is already in my contacts. Every call from that area code & first 3 that aren’t in my contacts is a new random spam call. Which average about 3 per day. I haven’t found a good blocking app that implements that logic without too many other drawbacks. Yet.
The one exception to these being spam calls is when some business or person I do know calls from a second line I didn’t already know about. They know to leave a message, I add the extra number to my contacts and that problem doesn’t recur.
No, in your example of 234-567-8901, instead of the spam number being 234-567-xxxx, the number in at least one spam call to me was 234-xxx-8901. So I looked and saw 8901 and almost thought it was the wife but then thought, “Hey, wait a minute. That middle part’s not 567.” At the same time, she too was getting calls from a number with the 567 portion of my number different but the last four numbers mine.
In the specific calls from this week that Google identified as from Hilo, I’m not worried about it. I don’t know anyone over on the Big Island, and the guy who finally left me a message said the calls could not have been from his number anyway, assuming he was not a scammer himself. I used to get a lot of calls ostensibly from Marriott Hotels over on the island of Kauai and finally blocked that number too. I’ve never even stayed at a Marriott anywhere in the world.
Cool. Thanks. I had not seen that move before. Knowing you’re only recently back to the US I figured maybe you hadn’t seen the particular trick I described.
I wonder if 234-xxx-8901 is going to become the newest spam tactic?
Unrelated, but are you in HI temporarily or permanently? If you told the crowd here earlier I missed that thread.
Here fairly permanently. Came back in August 2016. We may return to Thailand again in another 11 or 12 years.
Wow. I am behind the times. If you’d asked me I’d have said you’d been back about 6 months. Thanks for the update.
Because you sprained your tongue trying to speak the full name of Rama X and figure that in a dozen years it will be Rama XI, who has far fewer syllables in his name?
Since I do plan to set foot in Thailand again, forgive me if I don’t answer that. 
I had a lot of spam calls to my cellphone, and got the Hiya app and have gotten good results. YMMV :rolleyes:
I have no connection to the company.