Sorry....Wrong Number

4:00 am. The phone rang, jarring me from sleep. I ran to answer it with a sleepy "hello?" and half-expected to hear bad news. No good news comes at 4am. A craggy, old-woman voice whispered, "There's someone walking down the highway..." Great...it's that stupid old woman again. She can't seem to dial the right phone number. Our number is one digit from the local police phone number, and we hear from this old gal once in awhile.

She always speaks in a whisper. I don't know if she's trying to keep from waking someone up, or if she thinks the man walking down the highway can hear her. Again I told her she is not reaching the police department and to please dial the correct number. I hate to think how many times she called me right back with the same complaint. And why does she think it's against the law to walk down the highway at 4am?

We've gotten calls many times over the years from people thinking they've reached the police. Almost always it's something stupid that they're calling about. If that's the caliber of calls that our police get, I feel sorry for them. I don't think I'd last too long as a dispatcher. I'm afraid I'd yell, "Get over it!" one too many times when I heard their petty problems.

Our neighbor's phone number is real similar to the phone number of Daviess County Metal. He was constantly receiving calls from folks wanting to know how much something-or-other was. One day he'd had enough--a man called wanting a price on how much garage doors were. So he gave the man a price. I hope it was close to the actual figure.

I once was called by the sweetest old lady. She was trying to reach the Waltons, if I remember correctly. When I told her she had the wrong number, she started fretting. It must've been terribly hard for her to make one call, much less two. "Oh dear!" she said..."Would you call them for me?". What else could I do? I took the woman's phone number, and the name of the people she was trying to reach. I hung up and tried to call, but no one answered--and no answering machine picked up. So I called the poor old soul back and told her no one was home. She thanked me for trying, and hung up.

When I was a teenager, I got a call from a guy. I didn't recognize his voice, but he never did ask to speak to anyone. He thought he was talking to the person he wanted to talk with. After a few minutes, I realized that we didn't know each other...but I kept on talking to him. We must've talked for a half-hour and really had a good time talking. But after a while he asked me a question that I couldn't possibly answer, so I told him that he had actually called a wrong number. He was surprised, but told me that he really enjoyed talking to me. I'm amazed he never called back.

But doesn't it irritate you when someone calls you and then in a demanding voice asks, "Who is this?"? I always asked them the same question. Invariably they hang up on me.

I've gotten calls from babies too. Somehow the baby hits just the right number and gives me a call. That's always good for a laugh or two.

In this day and age, we are able to hit *69 and get the number of the person that just called us--that is, if we don't have Caller ID. I don't get enough calls to warrant having Caller ID. So sometimes I'll just *69 and write down the number so I can call them back and be equally as rude. That's always been my plan anyway. Some day I may actually do it.

You know, we haven't heard from the whispering old lady in a couple of years now. She's either passed on, or in the nursing home...or maybe the man walking down the highway stopped in and did away with her in retaliation for her calling the cops on him so often.