This reminds me of that classic Thurber cartoon: lady on a couch, with old fashioned phone to her ear. “Well, if you knew I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”
When we first moved into this house, we got a new phone number. For several years we got calls for a Mrs Foley. The people calling were ancient on the line. We think we got Mrs Foley’s number when she died. eek…
My landline is one digit different from a local crap shoe store and the last two numbers of my line reversed is Papa John’s Pizza. Yeah, it’s fun sometimes.
Two of my favorite all time wrong numbers were left on my answering machine. The first was a woman who thought she was calling a friend and left a very graphic, as in made hardened heard it all lil’ ol’ me blush, phone call describing her date the night before. One should never leave such graphic messages on an answering machine. Suffice it to say, the woman’s a slut! 
Also, I had no idea that a message twenty minutes long could be left on it. The second was for a really good recipe for grilling a pork tenderloin. I started to call that lady back and thank her for the recipe.
I don’t have that problem with phones, but apparently Classmates.com allows more than one person to sign up with the same e-mail address, because I keep getting Classmates e-mails for Denise (and I’m a dude.)
Years ago, when I moved into my very first apartment ever and set up my very first phone line ever, I ended up with a phone number that had apparently belonged to a man who had disappeared in the night.
I got telemarketing calls. I got political calls. I got repeated angry collections calls: “This is regarding an important financial matter. Please call us back at 000-000-0000.” (long distance on my own dime to yell at them that NO, I had never heard of this guy, had no idea who he was or where he went, and wanted them to go away. I got nasty “But you don’t even have a forwarding address?” remarks from the collections people. “No, I don’t have a forwarding address for this gentleman I never met. I told you. I just got his old phone number. Update your records and stop calling me.”)
My favorite, though, were the random calls at 6:00 am on my answering machine that I would always just barely miss in my sleepy stupor. What were the messages? “Hi, this is AnnoyingCheerfulLady at CompanyX. We were calling to let Dean Campbell know that he really needs to into work this morning. It’s important. Please call us back at 000-0000.” I would try angrily calling them back, and not get an answer. Apparently my message of “Hi, you’ve reached beanpod. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back. If you’re calling for Dean Campbell, I am not him, I do not know him, I do not know how to get in touch with him. If you are calling for him, please delete this number from your records, as it is wrong.” didn’t get through to them. You’d think he would have been fired, eventually, and I could have had some peace. Oh no, the calls kept coming.
FINALLY, one morning, I answered it and got AnnoyingCheerfulLady and explained, quite politely, and she apologized all over herself and said she would delete the number. I managed to ask whether they ever got in touch with this guy, and why they wouldn’t notice that he never got their messages. She said she wasn’t sure. Not sure? Oh, we’re just a call center here, the company’s quite large. Ok, whatever, stop calling me. I went to sleep happy. A week later, I got another call from AnnoyingCheerfulLady#2.
“Dean Campbell,” whoever you are, I hate you.
ETA: I’m a chick, so the answering machine voice should have been that much more obvious.
See, the way to get them interested is to notify the people whose information is on those faxes. I know I’d be very interested to know that my mortgage information, or whatever, was being carelessly faxed to the wrong company. Not like you* have* to save them a lawsuit.
I am, of course, kidding. Mostly.
Really? To me that sounds like a great way to solve the problems of two people.
Yeah, it would be, but I was thinking it would probably generate all kinds of crap for **ZipperJJ’s ** company. I might threaten the bank with it if they didn’t stop, before I actually opened the can of worms. But then, my bark is worse than my bite. Maybe people made of sterner stuff would be willing to. 
And you sat there are listened to every word, didn’t you. 
I knew a guy who used to get drunk/stoned/sleepy calls late at night for a local pizza place. The guy tried to tell one hungry caller he had the wrong number, this wasn’t the pizza place, and the guy says: “So you’re just… some guy… in a room?”
Unfortunately at that point in his life he was, in fact, a poor college student living in a nearly empty studio apartment and so was “some guy, in a room”.
There is supposed to be a whistle that could be used by women getting dirty calls to hurt the ears of the caller. Might be useful not the first five times, perhaps, or for things like restaurants with close numbers, but after five times? Might discourage the schmuck.
The Register had an article some years back about a loo which automatically called when it ran out of toilet paper. Unfortunately, it was programmed incorrectly and called a person.
When I lived in Louisiana there was someone with my name who lived in town. He was a bit remiss in paying his bills, and wasn’t listed in the phone book. We had to patiently explain to callers that they had the wrong Voyager, but they pretty much believed us after one try.
The worst for me was that when I worked across the street, Google Maps somehow got my number associated with our location. People called all the time with odd requests, like for purchasing. When I asked them where they got my number they always said Google (not Maps) and since my number is out there for a conference I assumed they got it that way. I felt I had to be nice to them so not sully our company’s reputation. Finally I got someone to tell me exactly where they found it. I contacted Google, but nothing ever happened, and then my number changed.
<Post crammed full because this is my 10,000th post, and I want it to count. I think I won’t post for a while and enjoy the nice round number.>
control-z, sure you are. Now.
fetus, no, lived Ohio and Virginia, college in Indiana.
He did learn though - he started by identifying himself! Each successful call was a little like training a dog.
I had a friend (still do) who had the Domino’s number for his area. Dominos tried to buy it, he didn’t sell. So he ended up with a lot of pizza delivery calls - he always took the order. And he always turned off his phone ringer at bedtime.
Forgive me for the hijack, but you lived in Ohio at least until you were 5, no? By chance, were you fairly near the Pennsylvania border?
Sorry, lived in Ohio until I was 24, except for college, near the Indiana border. Then 5 years in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, then back to where I grew up. Right now I am a couple of miles from the hospital I was born in and about 15 from the small village I grew up in. Ghu only knows how I ended up a Democrat. 
OK, the whole thing was a linguistic hijack. I’ll quietly slip out the back now.
Part of my job is making collections calls to some very shady people. I am lucky if half the numbers I call weren’t pulled out of thin air when the contracts were started, so I am always very polite when I call the wrong number, and always immediately mark it as bad so that we never bother them again. That said, I once had the following exchange:
Me: Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Deadbeat McSkippedtown?
Wrong Number Lady, testily: You got the wrong number, ain’t no one here by that name.
Me: Okay, sorry to have bothered you.
WNL: Who the fuck is this?
Me, somewhat taken aback: If I have the wrong number, why the fuck do you care who this is?
WNL: Bitch, Ima kick–
Me: click
No, my calls were not monitored for quality purposes, and yes, the number I was calling from was unlisted. Still…oops.
Thanks, I guess equivocado means mistaken, right? I’ll have a bit of difficulty remembering that. Sometimes if I keep on saying, “Tiene el numero mal.”, they eventually get it.
Oh hell yes. You know I looked up Edward Wachenfeld and found him in Manchester NH, but of course, no number is listed, or I would definitely pass it on after calling that deadbeat out myself. I’m thinking about giving the callers each others’ numbers when I can get them off Caller ID.
Pretty much. “Equivocarse de” is the rather complicated verb closest to the English-language idea of “to make an error WRT ______” (the specifics are always included unless overwhelmingly obvious AIUI, though I could be wrong), but it’s really more like “[this error] happened to me WRT ______”. Spanish-language verbs regarding errors and mistakes tend to be this way; that is, the proper grammatical construction implies that it happened to an innocent victim, instead of being something the speaker perpetrated him/herself. So while we say “I forgot your number”, the Spanish equivalent is more like “Your number was forgotten at me”, which as you can see is a rather difficult idea to express in English. So:
Me equivoqué del número de Jorge, y llamó a Darryl Lict.
“I was mistaken about George’s number, and I called Darryl Lict instead.”
I know that’s way more than you bargained for, but I’m a geek
ETA: “Mal” doesn’t mean “wrong” so much as a more general “bad”, so you can imagine how odd it sounds to be told that you have “the bad number”.
I knew that, but it was the best I could come up with at the time. And like I said, I think they got the message. No hablo Español was not working.