And before 99% of the calls and texts you receive were spam, political campaigns inevitably addressing you by the wrong name with heartfelt pleas for money, IRS scams, “Bob” from Microsoft technical support, Your Car’s Extended Warranty, AI generated robocalls telling you not to vote, or someone’s hysterical babymomma who refuses to understand that whoever she’s looking for might have had this number in 2007, but they don’t have it anymore.
For a while I kept getting calls from this old lady who didn’t realize she had to dial an area code before calling her son. After the first couple I answered it and explained to her that she’s dialing the wrong area code, but she didn’t remember and kept calling me and I’d let it go to voicemail. They were pretty sad and I think she was just lonely and wondering why her son wasn’t answering.
Eventually she stopped so I hope she figured it out.
You just unlocked a memory for me, and this happened from about 2008-2010 (not cell related, but it is phone related).
One day we got home and there was a message on the machine from someone asking us to remember to bring something when we visited him. Unfortunately, we had no idea who it was, so we just wrote it off as a wrong number. It happened a few more times after that, and we were getting curious.
I’d moved into the house in 2006 and received that phone number at that time. We often got calls from bill collectors looking for the previous residents, so we generally let everything go to the machine.
One evening we got a call, and I think I recognized that the number was this person’s, so I answered it. I told him he had the wrong number, and he said he’d had that same number for years and read back my number, the one he’d just called. I was like, “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve had this number since 2006.” He tried a few more times, and it was sometimes late in the evening.
At some point I looked up the number he was calling from and found it was a nursing home, and the pieces started to fall into place. My wife and I talked about it a few times, and we decided that if our relative was doing that, we’d want to know. We weren’t upset, but it felt like information the family should have. Who knows who else he might be calling, or getting calls from. So, we decided that when he called again, we’d call the nursing home and let them know it was happening.
But, we never got the chance. He never called again.
And before 99% of the calls and texts you receive were spam, political campaigns inevitably addressing you by the wrong name with heartfelt pleas for money, IRS scams, “Bob” from Microsoft technical support, Your Car’s Extended Warranty, AI generated robocalls telling you not to vote, or someone’s hysterical babymomma who refuses to understand that whoever she’s looking for might have had this number in 2007, but they don’t have it anymore.
For a while I kept getting calls from this old lady who didn’t realize she had to dial an area code before calling her son. After the first couple I answered it and explained to her that she’s dialing the wrong area code, but she didn’t remember and kept calling me and I’d let it go to voicemail. They were pretty sad and I think she was just lonely and wondering why her son wasn’t answering.
Eventually she stopped so I hope she figured it out.
You just unlocked a memory for me, and this happened from about 2008-2010 (not cell related, but it is phone related).
One day we got home and there was a message on the machine from someone asking us to remember to bring something when we visited him. Unfortunately, we had no idea who it was, so we just wrote it off as a wrong number. It happened a few more times after that, and we were getting curious.
I’d moved into the house in 2006 and received that phone number at that time. We often got calls from bill collectors looking for the previous residents, so we generally let everything go to the machine.
One evening we got a call, and I think I recognized that the number was this person’s, so I answered it. I told him he had the wrong number, and he said he’d had that same number for years and read back my number, the one he’d just called. I was like, “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve had this number since 2006.” He tried a few more times, and it was sometimes late in the evening.
At some point I looked up the number he was calling from and found it was a nursing home, and the pieces started to fall into place. My wife and I talked about it a few times, and we decided that if our relative was doing that, we’d want to know. We weren’t upset, but it felt like information the family should have. Who knows who else he might be calling, or getting calls from. So, we decided that when he called again, we’d call the nursing home and let them know it was happening.
But, we never got the chance. He never called again.