Scene: Tom sitting at desk at work. (Yes, I do go to work.)
*ring! ring!*
“Thanks for calling Service-Oriented Finance Establishment. This is Tom. How can I help you?”
“Yeah, Tom, I need to do a price check.”
(Tom becomes intrigued, plays along.) “Okay.”
“I need to know what your cheapest forty gallon water heater is.”
“Well, sir, we are a Service-Oriented Finance Establishment, so I don’t have any information on that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have called the wrong number. Thanks.”
“No problem. Bye.”
This is only mildly amusing taken by itself. It slides into intruiging when you consider the fact that we get these sorts of calls quite often. I don’t mean “quite often” as in at least once a week. I mean we probably get six or eight of these a week. Many times they only say “Oh, sorry, I got the wrong number,” or they hang up on me (love that one, by the way, thanks). However, the scant number of times that the caller has identified the nature of the call leads me to wonder just what in the hell people are using for a phone directory.
Last week I got a call for a doctor’s office. After I identified myself the woman said, “Okay, my name’s Idont Listen, and I need to speak to Doctor Wallace. I’m not feeling good.”
A few weeks ago I got about a DVD. After I identified myself a second time the caller said, “Oh, this isn’t Walmart?”
We used to get calls for transmissions and engines. That one was actually kind of frequent, so I was able to figure it out. After I got the supposed number they were dialing, I looked it up and found out that our 800 number was one digit different from a transmission and engine company that sold stuff on eBay. People were simply hitting one digit instead of another. Before I figured that one out it was confusing, especially when the first or second time I answered one of those, a guy asked about an engine for sale. For a split second I wondered how he knew what was in my garage. Then I wanted to say, “Well, I’ve got this old Ford 351 that I’m thinking of getting rid of. It’s a Cleveland block. You need it?”
I have this feeling there’s a web site out there somewhere that directs anyone looking for any phone number for any business anywhere in the U.S. to dial our 800 number. Next time you look up a number on the web and call a business, don’t be surprised if I answer the phone.
That happens to me all the time too! Lately, it is Asian (or I think they are Asian) people asking me things in a language that is very clearly not English. One day last week, as woman got very irate with me for answering the phone and not being who she wanted me to be. She started yelling at me and finally said “What are you selling?” Selling? I’m not selling you anything lady, YOU CALLED ME! I only have 12 customers for crying out loud, and I know for a fact that she was not one of them.
If you solve the phone mystery, please let me know.
Dude, for a while we were getting collect calls from Angola prison. I only accepted one once, and it was because…shit, I don’t remember. But it was a good reason. When I told the guy he had the wrong number he said, “Awe, well, would you call my momma?”
I’m going to blame my then pregnancy (because I can do that) on the fact that I agreed to call this guy’s mom. I felt bad for him. I thought, “He’s wasted a phone call. Now he can’t call his mom.” Anyway, I said, “Sure.”
He said, “Yeah?”
“Uh, I guess,” I said.
And this guy turned to whoever was behind him and said, “This lady’s alright! She gon’ call my momma.”
When I got the mom on the phone she and I had a talk about how disappointing children can turn out to be. None of my kids were in prison, but one of them wet the bed. I felt her pain.
And just for the record, that’s the only time I’ve accepted a collect call from prison. I’ve heard there’s some sort of scam going on there, though luckily this guy was really trying to get a hold of his momma.
Okay, so it’s not just my office with this problem.
Gen, thank you. Thank you so very much for suddenly making the entire (short) life of this blog worthwhile with that story. If I can elicit more prison-related stories more often, I’ll know I’m doing something right, or maybe wrong – it’ll be something, though.
When I lived in Youngstown, my roommate and I used to get calls for the Tokyo Health Spa all the time because “this is the number listed for them in the phone book!” We’re not sure what phone directory they used because once, while bored, we went to the university library and pulled phone books back to 1985–nothing.