ARGH! Answering machine etiquette

[Sleepingmediocre]

I also had the joy of arguing with callers who had a case of mistaken identity when Roomie and I first moved to Texas and got an apartment.  Roomie has an incredibly common last name (along the lines of Smith or Jones), and by some coincidence, the last people to have our phone number had the same last name--and skipped town, leaving a large number of unpaid bills behind them.  We were constantly fielding calls from bill collectors who would say "Is this the Smith residence?" and, when we said yes, ask to speak to Eunice or George.  When we told them "There's nobody by that name here," they would reply, "But you SAID this was the Smith residence!" and basically act as though we were the world's biggest liars and were hiding Eunice, George and a huge pile of money with which to pay their bills under our beds.  I always wanted to shout "Yes, congratulations, this is a military town with over 100,000 residents, but you've managed to find the ONLY family named Smith!"

[Chivewarrior]

We used to get a lot of calls for a Crystal who none of us knew. Based on the nature of the messages, I think she had a fairly active social life- we used to get a lot of messages along the lines of "It's Danny, I'm at this party that you might like..." Never left a callback number or called when we were actually HOME so we could inform him that there was no Crystal here. (There was a lot from one guy.) Eventually the calls gradually tapered off. My mom said it must because people were wondering why Crystal never answered her phone...

I've had some interesting things on my cell phone. With my answering message, there's no way anyone could think that the phone belongs to anyone other than a nutty teenage girl. (I'll change it when I start my job hunt!) I got a series of messages from an insurance company looking for a Mary. I got four messages and was there to pick up twice, and both times told them they had the wrong number. Eventually they must have gotten ahold of Mary because they stopped calling me.

I also got pursued by a debt collection agency based out of... somewhere in the midwest. I think it was Colorado. We still don't know what that was about. At first, the calls from them were Unknown Name/Unknown Number on my caller ID, and they never left a message, although they have to have gotten my voicemail several times because I missed a bunch of calls from them. When I answered it, all it said (in a deep, ominous male voice) was "We would like to speak with you. Please call us back at (number)." I never thought of writing down that number, but eventually it turned up on caller ID with a number and I did a reverse lookup on that, and discovered it was a "National Asset Collection Agency". Eventually, my mother called them back and informed them that they were calling a teenager who has no assets.

[kethria]

Oh I just remembered an incident 5 years ago or so. Johnnie Cochran has a firm here in the DC area. Anyhow he got a settlement for several million dollars for this woman whose son was killed by the PG County Police. And this lady and I have the same first and last names. Only I go by my middle name. So we would get dozens of calls a day from "cousin ralph" calling to see how we were. I had no idea till I answered and someone was like wow... you sound different than I expected. And I was like "really? Who are you?" And they explained that they were my 4th cousin once removed etc etc and they were very sorry about the death of my son... but they had bills to pay... etc" and I was like son? Um. You have the wrong number.

[goblue2539]

Information has actually given out our office number as the number for a local dentist.  Since we do insurance, I don't know how you can reschedule your appointment or if we can do a walk-in cleaning.