Yes, I called the police. I TOLD you I WOULD

The BBQ Pit
21

I had a friend in college whose phone number was apparently one digit off from the number for the free clinic.

Her voice mail message was something like “Hey, this is [first name], I’m not here right now so leave a message.” Doesn’t sound much less the message you’d get calling a clinic, or any place of business, does it? But she got DOZENS of messages like “Doctor [last name that sounds nothing like my friend’s first name], my toe is all swelled up again! Why didn’t you call me back? It’s swelled up so big I can’t get on my shoe, and there’s this green stuff coming out! Why doesn’t this damn clinic ever return my calls?”

Finally she changed her message to, “Hey, this is [first name] at 555-1234, not the free clinic. The number for the free clinic is 555-1235. If you are calling for me, [first name], please leave a message. If you are calling for the clinic, please call 555-1235.” That helped, although she continued to get messages from the sick and confused.

“Hello? Is this the free clinic? Why doesn’t anyone pick up the damn phone there? My toe’s all swelled up…”

22

My uncle used to have a number one digit off from a cheap pizza place. At first the wrong numbers annoyed him, then he started taking the orders and phoning them in to more expensive pizza places.

My uncle’s weird like that.

23

That would be my guess. We changed our number after getting a series of hang-up calls, turned out our new number had belonged to someone who lived in a secure apartment building. I had to call the building manager there to get our number removed from their auto-dialer. We still get people speaking Spanish every so often; the last person who had our number was somone named Rodriguez.

24

My hubby has had the same number for ten YEARS and there was a woman calling here last year asking for Dave. Dave has NEVER AFAIK lived with my hubby and since it’s been hubbys number for ten years I think he’d know. I told this to said woman every day for a month till I told my hubby to answer the phone on his day off and HE told her. Stupid bitch FINALLY got it. :rolleyes:

25

pencilpusher, “Dave” might have been some guy she was interested in, who didn’t return her feelings and gave her a fake number. Not that I know what that feels like. Poor girl.

26

They likely confused your number with their drug dealer’s number. The conversation seems to indicate this, and so does the persistant calling. Nothing more persistant than a druggie in need of a cheap fix.

Call the Vice or Drug squad, and let them know, also.

27

How come you didn’t leem message?

28

But by that time I had had the number about ten years!

It wasn’t all that convenient. I had to set up an appointment and be home during a span of several hours when they would be in the neighborhood. I felt awkward calling them on a matter that was, relatively, trivial compared to a lot of their work. But I wanted those calls stopped, and I’d let them get away with it for far too long.

29

Christ, the lady who had the phone number I have now had a really problematical lifestyle. First, there were teenage girls calling at all hours for her stupid kid. Stupid, you say? Well, then there was his damned school, calling to report he hadn’t shown up to school, sometimes two days out of five. This might be because the kid was no longer anywhere near the vicinity. Then there was the bank calling to reposses her SUV. And there were the collect calls from prison. “Will you accept the charges?” I was starting to get a rather unpleasant opinion of this lady, which was not changed when she called me herself, and told me to just leave her number on my caller ID so I could hand it out to her family and friends. The idea of calling them herself never seemingly occured to her.

There was a power failure, and I lost the number. But I always wondered how she dealt with the repossession of that SUV.

30

We were assigned a phone number a few years ago that had belonged, as we discovered, for the previous 25 years or so to a guy who was high in a Masonic Temple, and a lot of folks had old directories with our number. We learned this by finally asking one person who called if they could check with the temple and get his correct number and give it back to us, which they were kind enough to do. We then called him and he was quite delightful and apologetic, got his permission to give the number out to anyone who called us. We taped his number to the phone and gave it out frequently for several months, until the calls finally ceased. Then the phone the number was taped to died, and was relegated to the basement.

A fully year later a woman called and was just distraught – turns out the Masonic guy’s wife had cancer and she was just desperate to get hold of her. I actually went to the basement and dug his number up for her, and apparently there were no problems because he never called us back to complain about it. So sometimes the frequent wrong numbers aren’t totally aggravating.

But my favorite was the elderly lady years back who would misdial me at LEAST once a week and ask for her friend, Mrs. X. Mrs. X’s name was odd enough that I looked her up in the phone book and found out there was a one digit difference between our numbers. So every time her friend would misdial me from then on, I’d politely explain that she’d called 555-1234 and really needed to call 555-1235. Without exception, she would huff in my ear, “WELL!” and slam the phone down. I still laugh about her!

31

I had this drunk guy call me and accuse me and my wife of sleeping with his wife (I’m single)

<Ring>

“Hello”

“Is Sally there?”

“Umm… No you got the wrong number.”

“Liar! I now she’s there, and I know what’s going on…”

“No you really have the wrong number.”

“The two of your are fucking Sally, and I want it to stop!, I want her back!”

“Umm ok…That may be hard to do seeing as I don’t know Sally and I’m single”

Oh shit! I got the wrong number. Bye."

<Click>

A few minutes latter the phone rings again.

<Ring>

“Hello”

“Stop fucking my wife!”

“It’s me again, you dialed the wrong number…”

“Oh I’m sorry man. I’m kinda upset. I just found out that my wife is having an affair with some guy and his wife. What should I do?”

“I don’t know. How about you stop calling me?”

He then spent five minutes explaining the problems with his wife, and how he found out about the affair.

“Yeah, that’s to bad, but do think telling this to a stranger is helping?”

“No, I guess not… Will you help me get her back?”

“No”

(Sounding disappointed)“OK, sorry. Bye”

<Click>

A few minutes latter…

<Ring>

“Hello”

“Oh shit, Wrong number again”

<Click>

He never called back. It was kind of disappointing, I would have liked to find if he and Sally worked it out

32

I used to have a phone number that spelled out ora lsex. I would occasionaly get truely odd phone calls late at night, but no one ever forgot my phone number.

33

My home phone number is one digit off from some hotel’s number here in Amsterdam. Occasionally, I get calls from people wanting to book rooms and such. About once a month or so, so it’s no big deal, really. I’ve learned to say “this is not a hotel” in 56 languages now. :smiley:

Also, when I just moved here, I kept finding messages from some American guy calling to find a certain Patrick. I’m assuming this was the person who had my number before me, but the caller never left a number (I don’t have caller ID or other fancy gadgets like that). The messages kept coming in for months on end, always when I was at work. I felt bad for the guy, because he was obviously losing a lot of money on phone calls to the Netherlands, and since my message is in Dutch, he probably had no clue he was dialling the wrong number. As luck would have it, he called as I was walking in one day. I finally got a chance to tell him that I wasn’t Patrick, nor did Patrick live there. He apologised for the hassle, and that was it.

34

My home number is two digits off my ex high school’s number, we get all kinds of calls asking about school terms and such.

The funniest by far is the day my brothers head of school/dean rang looking for the school and my father had a chat with him about my brothers progress at school.

35

New cell phone, day one.

(name), blah, blah, blah, blah (In Spanish) – Repeat 500 times over the next two weeks. Didja tell this woman that her number was disconnected before you gave it to me?

36

How is it that ‘leem’ hasn’t become the latest SDMB catchphrase?

37

A phone number I once had was one digit away from a strip bar.

I’d sometimes get phone calls at odd hours, mostly from drunks asking how late we were open, or when Bambi or Natasha or whoever the feature dancer of the week was scheduled to dance that night. They didn’t really bother me; I was working weird shifts at the time and so I was up at odd hours. And the callers were generally pretty good about understanding that they had the wrong number.

But I well remember one call for the strip bar. It wasn’t from a dull, drunken male voice; it was bright, sober and female: “Hi, this is Brandy. I’m calling about the ad in the paper for dancers? When can I come in for an audition?”

Being a single guy at the time, you can imagine what I was thinking!

No, I did the gentlemanly thing and told her she had the wrong number… sigh.

38

Gosh. What else would you expect from the leeming tillions?

What??
Hey, put down the 1920s style death ray, willya?

39

Nnnnnno…People hound their dealers for more product, not for an adjustment on price. Well, maybe if they wanted a refund in the hundreds of dollars, but not ten. A dealer himself wouldn’t try to extract ten dollars over the phone, either.

What can you get for ten dollars anyway? There’s no longer any such thing as a “dime bag”, and AFAIK, harder drugs were never available in ten-dollar increments. Ten dollars just doesn’t fit into the drug equation nowadays. (Mods, I hope this post is within the board guidelines.)

40

My phone number is the same as a local diving gear store, except their last two digits are the transposition of my last two digits (their last two digits are 54, mine are 45).

For the longest time after I first got my number, I got calls from an incredible amount of people who seemed incapable of finishing the dive shop’s number with the proper two digits. Including leaving long rambling messages on my machine intended for the dive shop. You’d think they’d know better if the machine doesn’t say anything about a diving gear shop. :rolleyes:

I finally resorted to changing the machine’s announcement to say something along the lines of: “This is (phone number). This is NOT the diving gear store. If you think this is the diving gear store check the number again!”

That did the trick.