Sorry, Wrong Number

You know how when you first move into a new place and get a new phone number, and there’s that period of time during which you keep getting calls for the previous holder of the number? Yeah. About how long does that period last usually? A couple of months tops, right? Right.

I’ve had my current home phone number for coming up on four years, and I’m still getting calls for the previous business that had the number. Which was Midwest Guns. Which the more astute of you may have figured out sells guns. Also? They hold permit training classes. For which people inquire and enroll and then cancel and then reschedule and then can’t make when their car won’t start because their stupid kid left the interior lights on.

I’m kind of the unofficial secretary/therapist for Midwest Guns customers. I started out with the standard, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.” Click. But the calls became so frequent that I ended up having to look up the real Midwest Guns to see if they were still in business, and, if so, what their new number was. Turns out they relocated to 708-land—Lyons to be exact. So I started having the new number at the ready for their customers.

Then I started getting their messages on my answering machine, some of them desperate pleas to find out if a class was still going on or if they would get charged a fee if they cancelled. So then it progressed to me calling people back to make sure that they knew they’d left a message at the wrong place. 

Trust me, I’m usually not this helpful. Maybe I was afraid to mess with people that owned guns. Or maybe it was just that Midwest Guns customers, many of whom were extremely old and hard-of-hearing, seemed particularly in need of assistance. Too much time at the old shooting range sans headphones? In the end, it was the oldest and deafest of their customers who led me to the root of my problem:

Me:  “Hello?”

Old Man Yelling at Cloud: “WHO’S THIS?!” (said like he was completely exasperated with the caliber of customer service these days and the young whippersnapper who dared answer the phone without stating the name of their establishment)

Me:  “Who’s this?”

Old Man Yelling at Cloud: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WHO’S THIS?”  Pause. “Is this Midwest Guns?”

Me: “No, this is not Midwest Guns.”

Old Man Yelling at Cloud: “I was told to call this number…” 

He proceeded to rattle off a number that was not my phone number. After about twenty minutes of yelling at each other at the top of our lungs, I finally figured out that some sort of Bureau of Muskets & Firesticks (can you tell that I don’t own guns?) was handing out my phone number to all comers.

I called the number, expecting to have to go through a lengthy robo-menu, oodles of bureaucracy, and lots of denials before I got any satisfaction. On the contrary, an actual human being picked up the phone, stated the name of her agency, and recognized the source of the problem immediately when I told her my story. She knew exactly which resource to reference, and promised to correct the phone number in all of the various places that it was listed.

And it seems to have actually solved my problem. For the most part. Just as I was starting to get misty over my water-colored memories of all the gun-toting buddies that I’d left behind, my phone rang. My hand to God, as I was writing this article, I received my first wrong number in months.

“Hi, do you guys offer CFP training…”