Miscommunications

Most of us have received that phone call from a number we don’t recognize.  My wife and I look at it, asking each other if it’s a name we recognize.  We answer, and a voice says, “Dave?”  No, there’s no Dave here, so I inform the caller.  If he, she, or they happen to have been brought up with some sense of telephone etiquette, they’d apologize that they had the wrong number.  If not, they’d simply disconnect.  

My later father-in-law had an interesting conversation with someone he described as an older, female voice.  When he answered, she asked for someone whose name was a mystery.  When he told her there was nobody there by that name, she grew exceedingly surly, responding, “I know he’s there.  You put him on the line.”  This went back and forth several times, becoming less and less friendly until my father-in-law gave up and hung up the phone.  We never knew if she found the scoundrel for whom she was looking. Before caller ID, wrong numbers were a fairly regular occurrence.  My guess is that, in watching television from the UK, they would answer the phone by reciting their phone numbers.  It verifies the number the caller was trying to reach.  Now, when we’re all screening calls, we’ll ignore much of what comes through and if they leave a voice message, we let them know . . . . or not.

In ages past, “wrong numbers” weren’t out of the ordinary.  My father’s business phone – he had a home office for his industrial sales business, was also our home phone for a number of years, so we were taught to answer, “Walters Company”, and to take detailed, accurate messages as he was very often out on the road.  But personal calls would from time to time confuse the caller until we could explain.  Eventually, a second line was installed to make it easier to reach family members, but some callers equated “Walters Company” to “Downton Abbey – Carson speaking”, and seemed to miss the formality of the answering voice.

When I was in high school and college, I had a job as a desk clerk at a very nice motel, called Winding Brook Lodge.  I remember to this day, and it’s been a while, their phone number ended with 3111.  All well and good, except the local hospital’s number ended in 4111.  You can see where this is going, as folks calling the hospital weren’t always in a good place.  Many is the time that I’d answer in my smoothest telephone voice, “Winding Brook Lodge”, only to have the caller respond in agitation, “Is this the hospital?”  My temptation was, of course, to answer tartly, “Did you hear what I just said?  I said Winding Brook Lodge.”  But, I refrained, and said in my most calming tone, “No, their number is  . . . 4111.” 

I’d written before about one of my favorite “telephone” exchanges.  In case you missed it, here it is again.  My parents had bought an old farm in a small town in Southwestern New Hampshire.  It was initially a weekend/summer type fixer-upper.  My father would call our neighbor on Friday afternoons in the cold weather before we left the Boston suburbs to “escape to the country”, asking him to go down and turn the heat on, which he always did.  My father was attempting it one Friday, and happened to get Edgar Hastings on the phone.  Edgar’s wife Frieda normally ran the switchboard, but she must have been out, so Edgar was in charge. For visual effect, Edgar always wore a plaid flannel shirt, overalls that had been around for generations, and he smoked a corncob pipe. He also drove around town on his old farm tractor instead of his equally vintage pickup truck. My father asked to be “put through to Al Colby”.  Edgar replied, “He’s not home.”  This was not a helpful suggestion, it was a statement that brooked no discussion. If one was a village resident, you realized that Edgar had dismissed you.  Not my father, used to operating in the business world.  He persisted.  “Would you please try him anyway?’  “Won’t do any good – he’s not home” came back the reply.  This interchange went back and forth for some time before my father finally ended the call with a look that can only be described as utter disbelief.  

As long as telephone numbers have been used to make telephone calls, and now replaced by texts, there will be wrong numbers.  The etiquette handbook hasn’t been updated since Ma Bell had little toddler telephones, and we’re left to our own devices.  I get texts all the time, leaving me with “invoices attached”. They’re from connections I don’t recognize, so I just delete them, and hope that someone in another part of the country isn’t waiting impatiently for them.  It’s trickier today, because the scammers are out there, waiting for us to latch on to what they’ve sent us.  The Nigerian prince that was sending us millions, as long as we sent back a few thousand, has moved his operation to basement call centers across the Asian subcontinent.  I had a call one day from a gentleman with a heavy accent purporting to be from Publishers Clearing House.  He informed me that I’d won four million dollars.  When I asked why caller ID registered as “unknown caller”, particularly as Publishers Clearing House is a reputable company, he had no answer.  He just needed my bank routing information to forward my prize.  Of course, he did.  When I hung up, he called back and, in a belligerent tone, stated the obvious: “You hung up on me!”.  Good idea, so I did it again.  Didn’t hear from him again, although I didn’t get my four million dollars either, nor did anyone appear at me door with a large check so I could use my practiced look of surprise and delight.

I can understand how phone numbers can get slightly mixed up.  I do that with my user names and passwords too.  Love the t-shirt that says “I dream of the day when I put in my username or password, and the prompt replies, ‘close enough’.”  Yes, I’ve messed up a few times too on my bank card PIN.  It, of course, declines my purchase like I’m a deadbeat.  Then the bank texts to tell me that it was declined because of the wrong PIN number.  Thank you very much.  Would you mind telling that to the cashier, who looked at me with deep suspicion?  Now, too, I’m getting emails to people other than myself.  I have two active email accounts, which, yes, I know, are rather quaint in this day and age, but they both start with my name.  So, why did I receive an email just last week that started, “Dear George.”  Wait, what?  The message continued, “We’ve received your application and are waiting for it to be processed.”  OK.  Do I let them know that I’m “not George”?  Is poor George waiting at his computer for a major job opportunity?  Is George sitting at a desk in a small cubicle, expecting the order that will put him in line for “salesperson of the year”?  Do I respond that they’ve got the wrong email, in which their artificial intelligence isn’t quite so intelligent, or if I respond, am I engaging with that call center in Mumbai or Uzbekistan?  It’s all so confusing when we reach out, or someone else reaches out to the wrong contact.  And, I have to say, it’s way, way too easy for folks from Medicare Advantage plans, or vendors of “final expenses”, to get my name and phone number.  Better in the days when the numbers were all printed in a book the size of the Gutenburg Bible.  It was much easier in the days when someone was trying to reach Dave.