Tommy,
She may have forgiven, and you may have explained, but she isn't EVER gonna forget. Ever.
Pencil pusher…I hate to do it but…
“hello”
“Yeah, lemme speak to Dave”
“Dave’s not here man” (best stoner voice)
and let the hilarity ensue
buttonjockey308
Doesn’t matter anymore…she’s an EX
You’re right about the NEVER “forget” thing though…right up to the end she would bring it up during an argument
Believe it or not we’re friends still…I don’t doubt that there are times when we talk she’d LUUUV to bring it up but realizes she cannot anymore
That ALMOST makes up for all the aggravation that wrong number caused…almost 
Aren’t phone numbers, once disconnected, supposed to remain “dormant” for like 6 months or something? To prevent this sort of confusion? I don’t know where I heard this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that make sense?
My best friend’s mother was REALLY pissed off last year b/c her cell phone number was erroneously given out on a commercial for a day-spa. She would get like a billion calls every time that commercial ran.
She had to get a new number to stop the calls; I keep forgetting to ask if she ever called up the day-spa to bitch them out and get compensated for all the days she couldn’t use her cell phone.
And didn’t Bruce Almighty give out a real phone number that belonged to some poor lady who kept getting calls for God? That would’ve been funny for, like, an hour. And then I’d have gotten really freakin’ pissed off.
Okay, t’was just a thought.
Audrey, I believe you’re correct about how long phone numbers are supposed to be dormant, however, it doesn’t always work, so to speak. A few years ago, my husband and I moved into a house that we were renting that had been empty for almost a year (landlords were friends, the previous people had skipped, they couldn’t find anyone who they could trust to live in it, blah blah blah - you don’t care abou that part) and we were getting “drop ins” pulling in the driveway looking for the previous people who had lived there until we moved out three years later. That makes FOUR YEARS those people were gone, history, hasta-la-bye-bye and their friends/family never figured it out. 
Some people (we strongly suspect they were across the road) were using my number to ‘case’ the house. They’d call, and if someone answered they’d hang up. If no-one did, they’d break in and steal what they could. After four break-ins in three weeks, I got the number changed and unlisted.
The people before us - her name was Leila, I don’t know his name - apparently used to run a deli, or some sort of food supplier. I would regularly come home to find an answerphone full of orders for ten kilos of tabouleh or baba ganouj.
I never actually took a phone call like that - they all came while I was at work. The phone calls I did get to take were personal calls from people who spoke very little - if any - English and couldn’t comprehend why they couldn’t speak to Leila. I had to refuse a surprising number of reverse-charge phone calls from Greece. These calls started to peter out after about four or five months as ( I assume) these people started to get the word out about their new number.
One afternoon I came home and found a message on the answering machine from someone demanding $10,000 be repaid. “Cute”, I thought.
A week later, another message, this time demanding that the “Athenian motherfuc_er” pay back the $10,000 by the end of the week or he’d get his knees broken. I wasn’t from Athens and I hadn’t seen my mum in weeks, so I felt I was pretty safe. No number, no other details, so I deleted it and got on with my life.
The next week, I got a slightly longer message from the guy who was coming around “right now” to get his $10,000 and I’d “better fuc_in’ be there”. I checked the time on the message - about ten hours earlier. I wondered briefly about the Athenian’s kneecaps, but thought no more of it. That was pretty much the last message left for those guys.
Anyway, at the time, I was working in a call centre for a life insurer. About three months later, I took a change of address from a woman who called. I finished the call and was keying in the change of address details, when I found my own phone number on the third page of the screen. Unfortunately, I’d missed the opportunity to ask about how Leila’s husband’s kneecaps were, and after debating it with myself for three weeks, I found I was just too professional to call back and ask.
I’m still cursing myself that I didn’t. IDIOT! IDIOT! IDIOT!
I might be able to beat you all on the my-number-used-to-be-a-weird-business-number front.
I used to live in a part of Nevada that had a high amount of both Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Thusly, there were a lot of businesses that catered to the specific demographics.
During rodeo season, we got calls all the time in Spanish. Our number was a previous number of the local Mexican Rodeo.
Apparently, our number was also very close to an Asian dry cleaner’s number. We got 5 or 6 calls a month about dry cleaning and rodeo information. I eventually learned the Spanish for “you are calling the wrong number”, and the dry cleaning customers seemed to get the picture fairly quickly. The calls eventually tapered off.
Our house used to be owned by a couple who we fondly refer to as the “Insane Feuding Lesbians”. We had LOTS of mail for them, with no address to forward it to, including quite a lot of overdue bills, and we had a repo man and a private detective come round.
Much more exciting than my last place, which had a phone number one off a local hotel. And the same fools calling who would not get the idea that “Hello, this is cajela and mr cajela, please leave a message” was not a good cue for “Put me through to room 101 please”
My SO once had a phone number that somehow got used in a Yellow Pages ad for a sandwich shop near his home.
He’d tell the callers that there was an error in the ad, and to call information. Some argued, some called somewhere else.
About 6 weeks after this started, there were flyers put out by the sandwich shop, with his phone number. He went in and compalined. The owner told him the ‘corpit ofis’ did all the advertising, and he needed to call the ‘corpit ofis’. So, we called the corporate office, who proceeded to tell us (me, as I had to go to his house to make the call during business hours) that the phone company SAID that was the shop’s phone number, and I could call and ask them. And sure enough, by that time, information was giving out his number as that of the sandwich shop. They also would admit that it WAS assigned to my SO.
So, since the phone company didn’t care, the corporate office didn’t care, and the owner didn’t understand enough to care, we disconnected the answering machine, and at night, told people that they shouldn’t trust food from a place that didn’t know their own phone number. ABout a week after we started that, the sandwich shop put a neon sign of their phone number in the front window. It was, however, SO’s number.
He had to change the number to get away from the mess, and yet, when he offered to sign over the number to Blimpie’s (ooops), the ‘corpit ofis’ refused it, because they were closing the location because of lack of business. Hmm, WE were getting up to 100 calls a night, 200 on holiday weekends.
Quack, that reminds me of the old Wall of Voodoo tune–
Oops.
Leem: Irregular verb.
Principle parts: leem lempt lemptened
I was in a good mood one day, and the guys and I had been bangin’ around, crackin’ jokes and generally having fun.
So I was in a somewhat quick-witted state, and the phone rang.
“Hello?”
(Without preamble) “I think we should stop seeing each other.”
“Um, you know, you’re absolutely right. Can I have my lettermans jacket back?”
“What?”
“And my class ring. I’ll probably give that to the new waitress at Hooters.” (Which itself was strange in that we don’t have a Hooters.)
“You bastard! I knew it! I hate you!”
“I can see why. I’m really something of a cad, aren’t I? By the way, have you been by the clinic for a checkup? I have these sores…”
“Oh god, I don’t believe this!”
“What’s not to believe? Just because I’ve been sleeping with the entire cheerleading squad and most of the girl’s basketball team…”
“Is this Jeremy?”
“Who?”
“Omygaw!” (CLICK!)
I related it to the rest of the guys, who didn’t hear her part but were looking at me, puzzled about my part. We spent the rest of the day using “Omygaw!” whenever possible.
Yes, but they didn’t give an area code. People started calling that number in various area codes anyway and got a few answers. IIRC, the ditributor’s paid to have the people’s numbers changed.
‘Leem a message’?
That’s almost as cool as ‘Are you heffun du Cheddar?’
Here in Bawlmer, one stem of crack goes for $5, so ten dollars would be just enough for the wrong dialing couple to get a fix each. That’s for your standard “colors” - greens, pinks, blues, yellows.
There are more expensive “brands”, but I never heard them hawked in the open air drug market I used to live next to, so maybe they’re for your more discriminating behind-closed-doors crackhead. ::snort::
At the shoe store I worked at, we pegged our customers’ occupations by how they paid. The easiest to guess were strippers, who paid in all ones, and drug dealers, who paid in ones and fives, while buying a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff.
Ok, so I was replying to the drug conversation on the first page, not realizing that there was a second page to this thread, where conversation had moved on. V. sorry.
I’ll leem y’all alone, now.
A co-worker recently got a cell phone for his wife. Turns out her number used to be Kordell Stewart’s number (who used to play for the Steelers, but is now with some team in Chicago). She has taken calls from several of the guys at ESPN, as well as folks from SI and a bunch of other places. I’m sure they could have a lot of fun with this, but seeing how rough Kordell’s life is at the moment, I am pleased that they are not making it any worse.
My new sig line.
8-ball/eighth ounce $100-$160…
same as downtown.