You’ve called me about 5 times now. Every single time, I’ve told you that it was a wrong number. Every time, you muttered a name I can only understand well enough to tell it isn’t mine. I’ve had this number for a while (years), so the problem is on your end. Please wake up, smell the coffee, and change your frigging phone book.
Has anyone else had this happen to them? How long did it take before the person stopped calling?
Yeah, but are you sure Bob isn’t there? How about now? Now?
OK. I’ll call back later.
I had one guy call me and ask for someone called Azif - I told him he must have the wrong number, so he wanted to know who I was, and why I had Azif’s phone. I told him he had the wrong number again, and that I’d had this phone for years, but he kept calling back and asking for Azif - each time trying to find out who I was (as if that would help, somehow).
Oh my lord, I used to get the same woman doing this a few times a month, asking for the same woman every time. I actually keep here number listed under ‘Wrong Fucking Number’ so I can just answer ‘Learn how to use your fucking phone!’ every time she calls. Less now, though. Maybe once every few months. I think my number used to belong to her drug dealer or something. I just get that vibe.
It does bug me when people try to convince me that I’m the one that’s confused. I usually just tell them that it is the wrong number. If they continue to speak, they get hung up on.
Oh, god.
Last year we had this old woman call us. She was calling us from California. I tried to explain it to her the first 4-5 times. She simply didn’t seem to understand, and would hang up in the middle of us talking. She spoke perfectly fine English, so it wasn’t that.
Anyway, at first we were really nice. Then she kept calling. She was calling every night around 10-10:30. Well, it was only 7 in Cali. We started getting annoyed, then mad. The woman just would not get it. I considered the possibility that she might be messed up in the head and I was mad at whomever was supposed to be keeping an eye on her and obviously wasn’t. She was racking up long-distance bills I’m sure. If she was confusedly calling us, who else might she be calling?
She continued calling, every night, sometimes 2-3 times a night. We resorted to SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY INTO THE PHONE. I could have called the number back but we don’t have long-distance on our landline, only cellphone, and we have TracFones so we pay for every minute. So I didn’t want to do that.
Phone company said they could do nothing. We threatened to call the police on her (we weren’t going to, what would it do?) to scare her. Nothing worked. After a while I was pretty sure she was doing it out of spite and nothing more.
Finally after a goddamn month she stopped doing it.
That was my worst-case scenario ever.
Where I currently work, we’ve got people from call centers (probably a collection agency) calling up for an employee (former receptionist) who quit back in July. The problem is that they can’t take our number off of their calling list without verifying with HR, but they almost always call after 6pm when the HR person is gone. They seriously won’t take “she doesn’t work here anymore” for an answer.
I hope that former employee is in some serious trouble, because this crap is really freaking obnoxious and not our problem.
Hey, Ro Carter, this is Mgfrstrwer. Were there any calls for me?
I keep getting collection calls for a certain Mahmoud B., who apparently owes big money to a lot of places. I finally called one back to tell them he didn’t live at my address. I think it was Australia that I was calling. The operator kept wanting to know stuff about me, and wanted me to verify my address, but he wouldn’t tell me who he was, despite my asking repeatedly. Yeah, that’ll happen. At least the calls stopped, at least from that one place. Whoever the fuck they were.
I keep getting calls from an alarm monitoring company notifying me that the alarm at XYZ Market is going off. It is a local business but it’s not my business. I’ve called them and told them they are notifying the wrong person, but they say they can’t take my number off the list unless I have the secret code to change the notification number. How crazy is that? I’ve called the business owner but he has never returned any of my calls. I just don’t answer the alarm company’s calls anymore.
I keep getting calls occasionally from a collection agency asking for someone by the name of Susan. When I told her that it was a wrong number, she asked me “Well do you know her at least?” I said, “You have a wrong number. Why would I know her?” The caller has become progressively more rude each time.
I’m planning on calling my telephone company the next time it happens and seeing if there’s a way to find out who it is and block them.
A friend of mine has had her phone for years and years (15?). She still occasionally gets calls for Olga. We don’t know who Olga is, but she has some friends with old address books.
You should just go rob the place - when the alarm company calls you, tell them you’re already there and taking care of it.
For a while I was getting death threats for someone named Steve on my answering machine. Even though I changed my message to clearly state my name (which sounds nothing like Steve) and phone number, they continued. Unfortunately, at the time, the only thing you could do was press *51 to get the phone company to trace your last incoming call, and of course every time it happened someone else left a perfectly reasonable message after the death threat.
This is the first thing I thought of when I read the OP.
As teens, we, er I mean, I heard about teens who would call someone over the course of several days asking for a person they knew wasn’t there. Then, after a short lull, a new person would call and say they were this person, and ask if there were any messages.
As I understand it, this was thought to be very funny at the time. So I hear.
My company keeps getting faxes from SunTrust bank in Knoxville, TN that are meant for someone else. They’re sending us somewhat personal stuff such as copies of people’s mortgage agreements or proof of insurance.
If and when we do get ahold of them and tell them to knock it off, they are simply annoyed that our fax number is receiving faxes sent to it as opposed to “wow thanks so much you just saved us a lawsuit!”
It seems to happen every few months or so, and we can’t figure out why. Not like SunTrust is interested in getting to the bottom of it or anything.
When we lived in the Albany,NY area we apparently had the old number of a deadbeat family with a son who was not nice to girls. I was a teenager at the time. We got calls from MANY different people and one who was so upset Marguerite was not there since she was calling from Mexico. It was almost like she expected me to turn into Marguerite because the call was expensive. One time some nice looking young man showed up at our apartment looking for them. That was bizarre since it’s not like phone numbers have ever been tied to addresses in that part of the world. One time my brother answered the phone and some girl started screaming at him because he treated her friend so badly. Meanwhile, he was like 13 and I don’t know that he’d ever had a conversation with a girl, much less break her heart.
Some moron kept on calling me at 3 in the morning. It was the wrong fucking number the last 3 times you called, shit for brains. I actually diagnosed the problem for the idiot. Are you using someone’s cellphone from the 805 area code and trying to call a local non-805 number? I was right!
And is this the right thing to say to those damn non-english speaking Spanish speakers?
Yep, we, er, people we knew did that too. The thing is, I’d seen it on TV as a comedy skit a couple of times. One of those times was on Sesame Street.
I’m sorry sir, this is Company XYZ, not the Internal Revenue Service.
No, I don’t know which form you need.
I’m sorry. I can’t transfer you to that extension, this isn’t the IRS.
It’s gotten to the point that every year, as tax time rolls around, people in this office start keeping the correct phone number for the IRS at their desks. It’s just so much easier to tell them the right number and hang up.
I once had two giggly (presumably) teenaged girls calling me over and over to ask if they were the 7th caller. Six times I explained I was not a host of a radio show and they had the wrong number. The next time I told them, “Why yes, you are the 7th caller, please come to the station Right Now! to claim your prize.”
Hope they got something.
Haven’t had any trouble at home, but at work. It’s a radio station. We do two call-in shows. We have dedicated phone lines for that purpose. Our number has been the same for years and years before I got here. Well, when people dial the number of some library archive department in town, our call-in show lines ring. The engineer says they’ve tried for years to get it rectified with the phone company and the library, but nobody is going anywhere with it.
So every day, the phones ring themselves to death in the empty studio, unless we remember to hit the X button to turn the lines off. A lot of people must be pissed off that nobody at the library is answering their calls. It must be really quiet over at the library. Maybe they wonder why nobody ever calls them. I do know that if we answer any calls and they’re for the library, and we tell them they’ve reached the wrong number, without fail the next line will ring in about 15 seconds. It’ll be the same person.
fishbicycle, why not just put those callers on the air?