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This can be nasty. A friend of me once got a ton of phone calls for a specific realtor. Turns out the realtor made a misprint on their business card. The rea

This can be nasty. A friend of me once got a ton of phone calls for a specific realtor. Turns out the realtor made a misprint on their business card. The realtor didn't want to do the expense to print new business cards, so they were just going to give this card to everybody. Could he just forward everybody to them, and maybe fill in their customers on some basic information like opening hours and holidays etc. This pissed him off enough to sell his phone number to a competing realtor.

michaelcampbell 6y ago
I read/heard a similar story of a hotel getting a number that was a digit off from some old woman who'd had it for years. After they refused to change it, she started taking reservations, and booking wedding parties and the like, if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number. The hotel did eventually capitulate.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  That same thing happened to my friend M in college. Back then - '89 - our school was probably not unusual in having a campus phone number scheme that was super predictable. The phone number in room X of building Y was 348-xxx1, say, and the next room on the hall was -xxx2, etc. So if you knew the building, and you knew which room someone lived in, you knew the number. Campus telecom never changed this up at ALL. Well, in the summer of '89 they built a new rec center, and it obviously got new numbers. And the number they put at the racquetball court reservation desk was one digit off from M's number. He got racquetball calls ALL THE TIME, but the ones that annoyed him were very early in the morning. He complained to Telecom, but they wouldn't help, so he did what your little old lady did: he started taking reservations -- and to make it worse, he gave out confirmation numbers. The rec center didn't have a confirmation number system. After about a week, the racquetball center got a new phone number. Which is hilarious and shows how stuck campus telecom was in their thinking, bc it would've been way simpler (you'd think, anyway) to give M and new number given how much printed matter had the racquetball number on it by then.
- colanderman 6y ago
  > if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number I will never ever understand this behavior (I've seen it in other contexts) of people who refuse to believe an inconvenient truth even when there is strong disincentive for the bearer to be lying, and immediate negative consequences for not recognizing the truth. Like, do they think the receptionist is just pulling a prank??
macintux 6y ago
I recall reading about a local business that lost their phone number of decades to a new hospital that printed a bunch of marketing materials with the wrong number and successfully persuaded the phone company to commandeer the number. Update: I remember now, the phone company gave them the wrong number to begin with. Just a bizarre story all around, and quite cruel to the original business.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Heh, I remember a case of a telecom thinking they owned a phone number and assigned it. It worked as expected on their PSTN and cellular network, but not from any other network.
Kipters 6y ago
Something similar happened to me, some shop misprinted some flyers and put our landline number on them. We got calls for years and sometime we still get some (you can infer how much time has passed since by the fact I'm talking about a landline)
gumby 6y ago
This is related to how we got phone numbers in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger#Rotary_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger#Rotary_di...
drivers99 6y ago
When I was in college living with a roommate, a local daycare mistakenly listed our phone number in the Yellow Pages (it was correct in the white pages), so we’d get calls from potential (and existing?) customers. At first we’d tell them “wrong number” but my roommate liked messing with them (the constant calls were a nuisance) and would say they were out of business and other nonsense. The daycare eventually caught on and so the phone company called me and asked if we were telling people they closed (we denied it), and then offered us $200 to let them change our number as compensation. They said it would cover the cost of the calls we’d have to make to tell people about our new phone number, but it felt like a fortune to me as a college kid (more than half our rent). Point is, giving out the wrong number to people is not good marketing. That would be like letting your domain name expire in today’s world.

michaelcampbell 6y ago

I read/heard a similar story of a hotel getting a number that was a digit off from some old woman who'd had it for years. After they refused to change it, she started taking reservations, and booking wedding parties and the like, if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number. The hotel did eventually capitulate.

ubermonkey 6y ago
That same thing happened to my friend M in college. Back then - '89 - our school was probably not unusual in having a campus phone number scheme that was super predictable. The phone number in room X of building Y was 348-xxx1, say, and the next room on the hall was -xxx2, etc. So if you knew the building, and you knew which room someone lived in, you knew the number. Campus telecom never changed this up at ALL. Well, in the summer of '89 they built a new rec center, and it obviously got new numbers. And the number they put at the racquetball court reservation desk was one digit off from M's number. He got racquetball calls ALL THE TIME, but the ones that annoyed him were very early in the morning. He complained to Telecom, but they wouldn't help, so he did what your little old lady did: he started taking reservations -- and to make it worse, he gave out confirmation numbers. The rec center didn't have a confirmation number system. After about a week, the racquetball center got a new phone number. Which is hilarious and shows how stuck campus telecom was in their thinking, bc it would've been way simpler (you'd think, anyway) to give M and new number given how much printed matter had the racquetball number on it by then.
colanderman 6y ago
> if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number I will never ever understand this behavior (I've seen it in other contexts) of people who refuse to believe an inconvenient truth even when there is strong disincentive for the bearer to be lying, and immediate negative consequences for not recognizing the truth. Like, do they think the receptionist is just pulling a prank??

macintux 6y ago

I recall reading about a local business that lost their phone number of decades to a new hospital that printed a bunch of marketing materials with the wrong number and successfully persuaded the phone company to commandeer the number. Update: I remember now, the phone company gave them the wrong number to begin with. Just a bizarre story all around, and quite cruel to the original business.

Scoundreller 6y ago
Heh, I remember a case of a telecom thinking they owned a phone number and assigned it. It worked as expected on their PSTN and cellular network, but not from any other network.

Kipters 6y ago

Something similar happened to me, some shop misprinted some flyers and put our landline number on them. We got calls for years and sometime we still get some (you can infer how much time has passed since by the fact I'm talking about a landline)

gumby 6y ago

This is related to how we got phone numbers in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger#Rotary_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger#Rotary_di...

drivers99 6y ago

When I was in college living with a roommate, a local daycare mistakenly listed our phone number in the Yellow Pages (it was correct in the white pages), so we’d get calls from potential (and existing?) customers. At first we’d tell them “wrong number” but my roommate liked messing with them (the constant calls were a nuisance) and would say they were out of business and other nonsense. The daycare eventually caught on and so the phone company called me and asked if we were telling people they closed (we denied it), and then offered us $200 to let them change our number as compensation. They said it would cover the cost of the calls we’d have to make to tell people about our new phone number, but it felt like a fortune to me as a college kid (more than half our rent). Point is, giving out the wrong number to people is not good marketing. That would be like letting your domain name expire in today’s world.