MetaChat - Weird Phone Calls

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18 March 2008

Weird Phone Calls In various jobs, including this one, I occasionally answer the phone. Some of the calls I get are apparently from Martians. →[More:]Like the one I got this morning, in which a young woman wanted to know the open hours of all the stores in Asheville. WTF? I told her, look, here are the museum hours but how would I know what hours stores keep? She was confused by my refusal and said, Are there stores and stuff in Asheville? Yes. Yes, there are. They pick their own hours, go figure. It's a city. Cities occasionally have stores and stuff. I mean, has she never seen anything in her life but a mall? She really didn't get the fact that I had no idea what time everything closed. Weird.

My favorite ever, though, was when I was working at the art museum and an elderly gentleman called me to say and I quote: "I bought a painting in Asheville in 1974. What is it?"

Yeah, I'll gaze into my crystal ball and let you know, dude. Seriously, he couldn't even describe it or give me a gallery name and then he got mad at me. Because the person answering the phone at the museum should know everything. Everything. Okay, I know I'm not alone here in the great world of phone answering, so, what weird calls have you gotten?

post by: mygothlaundry at: 11:22 | 24 comments

Our office space is in a cube farm, and all incoming phone calls for everyone are handled by the front desk. Every now and then, we get calls for other businesses. The other day, I got a call for one, only the person on the line happened to be asking for someone with the same name of my boss. So by the time we got it worked out that he was looking for a different person by that name, I had to send him back to the operator, which made him even crabbier than he already was (and p.s. sir, you were calling for a staffing firm, and should you need to call a staffing firm again to let them know they messed up your interview somehow, you shouldn't be so rude. I wouldn't have bothered to reschedule you, with that attitude).

posted by ThePinkSuperhero 18 March | 11:26

a couple of weeks ago I got a call on my mobile. Guys says "Jackie?" I wasn't paying attention so distractedly said "yep" He then went on to arrange a meeting, all the while I'm racking my brains tryng to 1, recognise his voice, 2. guess what meeting I'm supposed to attend, so I gave a series on non-commital responses, until it became clear to me that he thought he was talking to someone else. He was giving instructions in a rude, agressive, way but hey, I work with surgeons mostly so that didn't trigger anything.

I said, "hold it, hold it, you've clearly got a wrong number"
He was silent for a second then said "then why the fuck did you say you were Jackie?" in a really loud and agressive tone. I was so pissed I replied, "because I am Jackie, dickhead, just luckily not the Jackie who has the misfortune to work for you!"

All those years of thinking of exactly the right thing to say hours after a conversation ended did not prepare me for the utter satisfaction of having the right response on the tip of my tongue.

posted by Wilder 18 March | 11:37

....and clearly I mean pissed in the American sense of the word, pissed off in UK speak.

posted by Wilder 18 March | 11:40

I work near both the IT and the QC department, in a 'spare' cubicle. I occasionally get calls for both the lab and/or the help desk, for whatever weird reason (we have IP phones, they're kinda flaky, and the interns also sometimes use this desk).

I've gotten so good at routing the help desk calls that the IT manager here asked me to apply for "any IT posting you see come up".

The lab guys mostly just laugh at me. We have a lot of foreigners in the QC lab, and their callers tend to not speak English as a primary language. Sometimes it takes awhile to decipher where I'm supposed to send these.

posted by lonefrontranger 18 March | 11:44

I play this fun game at least three or four times a week -

Me: Good afternoon, (name of business), this is bmarkey. How can I help you?
Caller: Yeah, you called me.
Me: Excuse me?
Caller: I got a call from this number earlier.
Me: Oh. Well, we have six trunk lines that go through here. It might have been anyone in the building. Have you been looking for a retirement community*?
Caller: A what?
Me: This is a retirement community. (Pause) Maybe you know someone who works here?

(Meanwhile, two more calls are waiting to be answered.)

Caller: What's the name of the place again?
Me (trying to wrap up): (Name of business).
Caller: Nope.
Me (losing the will to live): I'm sorry, I'm not sure I can help you then.
Caller: Well, this number showed up on my caller ID.
Me: Yes, well, as I say, it could have been anyone in the building.
Caller: Huh. OK. *click*

*Official euphemism for "old folks home".

posted by bmarkey 18 March | 11:50

There is some sort of mixup with a physician's office in the hospital and our lab in the medical school. (ie. people have been given our number instead of the physician's) so we often get phone calls from people expecting to talk to someone in a medical doctor's office. Even though I always answer the phone "Dr. Etgen's lab", so often people will just blurt out all of their symptoms and questions without pausing, and I have to insert myself into their monologue and suggest they have the wrong number. The problem is, I've tried to look for the hospital department they should be calling, and haven't come up with anything -- I can never find the name of the doctor they are after (and really, I don't really care, I'm not that helpful - usually they've called when I'm in the middle of something time-sensitive).

posted by gaspode 18 March | 11:53

*applauds Wilder*

posted by BoringPostcards 18 March | 11:58

Caller: Yeah, you called me.

I HATE THIS. Why do people do this? Why? No. Stop. Live with the mystery that someone called you and didn't leave a message.

posted by ThePinkSuperhero 18 March | 12:05

When I was telecommuting, my office in Boston set up the phone system so that my co-workers in that office could dial my old extension, and it would call me at my home in California.

Which was fine, except that sometimes customers would call in and either misdial an extension or just start pressing random numbers until a real person answered, and at least once a week I'd get a customer who managed to dial himself into my phone. Since these customers thought they were calling an office in Boston, these calls would usually come through at about 6am Pacific Time; since I had just a regular one-line home phone, once they came in, there was no way I could transfer anyone back to where they wanted to be; since it was usually WAY before I had had any coffee, trying to explain all this to people who were (a) annoyed enough by the automated greeting that they thought randomly pushing buttons was a good way to handle things, and (b) often already suspicious of the validity of our company because we were a start-up and usually dealt with people only over the phone or via email, while I was still in a "just woken up by the phone" fog, was really not fun at all.

posted by occhiblu 18 March | 12:08

Caller: Yeah, you called me.

HATE. Yes, hate hate hate. It was probably a wrong number. OR! Maybe take the time to actually listen to your voicemail before blind-calling the number on your caller ID.

I think it's at the top of my reception-annoyances. But usually when I get to the name of the business (organ and tissue donation) and then ask if they have recently had a loved one die, they get huffy and hang up on me.

posted by rhapsodie 18 March | 12:11

The Blanktop Chronicles has some awesome answering the phone stories.

My biggest beef is customers who want to chat with me. Because they're bored & it's Friday and they don't want to do any real work. I find it really hard to get them off the phone.

I can cope with the shouters and the sales calls though.

posted by seanyboy 18 March | 12:18

seanyboy, that blog is brilliant.

posted by mygothlaundry 18 March | 12:46

Oh my good lord, seanyboy, thank you for that link. Thank you thank you thank you.

posted by elizard 18 March | 13:05

My first job was at a specialty lingerie company, and I got a lot of personal questions from male callers who probably had no intention of buying adhesive bras or bra strap cushions.

posted by Ambrosia Voyeur 18 March | 13:41

They recently changed our phone system so that each department can receive direct calls. That is, as long as people stop to listen to the prompt. I can't tell you how often I'll get the phone "Meat Room, can I help you?" only to have the person on the other end say "Is this the Meat Room?" or "Hi, I'd like to order a fruit platter." At which point I have to put them on hold and page the correct department.

But one of my favorite phone calls was from an elderly woman. She called us because she had purchased a package of Perdue breaded chicken cutlets, and there was too much breading. Seriously. The best I could suggest was that she call their customer service number, since the product comes in prepackaged. She told me she'd already done that. I feel bad for that poor person.

posted by redvixen 18 March | 15:44

I used to work at a magazine, and we'd get lots of collect calls from death row inmates wanting to tell us about how they'd been wrongly convicted. I was generally just taking a message for one of the editors, but it was surprising how long the conversations would go on. It's hard to get those death row guys to shut up, once they start talking.

posted by mudpuppie 18 March | 16:32

The weirdest/most annoying was a few years ago, when my landline phone rang in the middle of the night, and woke me out of a deep sleep. It was some callow party boy on the other end; I could hear the sounds of a gathering of some sort in the background. His first words were something like, "Why the fuck did you hang up on me?"

Still being groggy, my reply was, "Huh? Whaa? . . . Who?"

The bonehead started yelling about how he knew I had called him and hung up without saying anything, and how pissed off he was. By this point I was awake enough to formulate an intelligent response, and I was just about to tell him that either he had dialed wrong, or somebody was fucking with him, but wasn't able to get much out before the bonehead hung up.

I was irked. To this day I don't know if it was somebody who was trying to be an imitation Jerky Boy, or if they really got a hang-up call. Either way, I hope karma catches up with him and punches him in the nads several times.

posted by deadcowdan 18 March | 17:34

Once when i was tripping, i got a phone call for Cletus. Something seemed altogether wrong with it, like it was some obscure slur or something obscene i didn't know about. There's wasn't no damn Cletus here.
People could occasionally call for Cletus and i made one of them almost cry while saying, "I"m so sorry!"

It turned out that a friend of mine knew a guy named Cletus who was only two transposed numbers away from mine.
i've felt bad about poor Cletus ever since.

i use to be so mean to unwanted callers when i was in college people would watch me in horror. i would use them to vent all my venomous hate. Once AT&T accepted that i would never use their service ever, it stopped and i started talking to the people behind the schtick.
My machine has fielded the weird calls for me for a decade before i ditched the landline completely.

One bad phone call can ruin a day. One rude client can make everything seem yucky.
Man, i hate that.

posted by ethylene 18 March | 17:46

I once had a guy stuck in some airport or another call me to see what kind of deal we would give him for his kidney. I tried to explain that, yeah, dude, selling and buying body parts is kind of illegal? But he kept going on and on about his sob story and how he needed money to get home and all he had left was his kidney and we had to take it, the plant fare was only a couple hundred dollars. He kept getting more and more angry that I wouldn't pay him for his organ until he declared he would "find someone else who would take it." I wished him luck.

posted by rhapsodie 18 March | 18:41

I was working onsite for a few days at BCBS and was sitting at a cube that several people rotated in & out of during the week. I wasn't going to be taking calls anyway so I ignored the phone. One day I went in & the vmail light was blinking, so I checked it. Some guy wanted to renew his prescription of somelongassdrugname of 150 mg. Wonder if he ever got it?

posted by chewatadistance 18 March | 19:18

my co-worker came from a call center with the cable company, she has some of the best stories.
~the weather channel changed their logo, why did they change the logo? its too big now tell them to change it back (lady we just bring you the channels we don't control the content!)
~I was watching the tennis channel and the girl in todays 2pm match needs to change deodorants! I don't like to see her sweat stains! you need to tell her to change deodorant! (um...yeah)
~I ordered "Debbie does Derby KS" on pay-per-view and its not working. (sir what channel did you order it off of?) ~69 (sir I have tuned to that channel and it seems to be working fine) ~hmmm what do you see? are they naked? what are they doing? do you think that is hot? ( um... um... )
~the words going across the screen on CNN are too fast and too small you need to make them slower and bigger (yeah I'll just call up ole Ted Turner and have him fix that for ya)

posted by meeshell 18 March | 20:52

Heh. I got to be the spooky call once. I got a call at my new job from a magazine trying to drum up subscriptions. Turns out the girl making the call was my new, pregnant sister in law. I recognized her voice, but she didn't recognize mine.

So I asked her if she knew where she was calling, and she's all "no, no, we don't have that information and we don't give it away..." then I told her she'd called an educational institution in the city I was living in (hoping to give her a hint to recognize me) but she barreled on, sticking to the script. I asked if she liked the city she was living in, but that went by the wayside.

Then I asked how the baby was doing. Pause. "um, what?" By this time I had to give up and identify myself. She started laughing hysterically, then let me know that the person training and coaching her had been getting more and more agitated at me and was thinking of starting the call trace process.

posted by lysdexic 18 March | 22:08

Hah, meeshell, your coworker would love my old job--I used to work the phones for the official online source of all US legislation. Users would find information about a bill they didn't like, then call the first number they could find to complain about it. So, yeah, some guy down in the IT department got to hear all about how the US and Mexico were going to merge, or about how taxes were too high, etc. Lemme tell you, there were some gems. One guy was sure he'd been nominated for a Federal judgeship, but couldn't find any record of it--must've been because we were hiding it from him. No information about the North American Union? Obviously, a conspiracy.

I did get to help a lot of folks find what they were looking for, and I really did enjoy that aspect of my job. I've spoken with HRM Caesar St Augustine De Buonaparte Emperor and ?.

I miss that part of my job.

posted by mrmoonpie 19 March | 10:46

I got a phone call last week at work from the postmaster general of some little town in Connecticut. She was calling because one of her postal customers had been sending us mailings and postcards for his photography services, but we hadn't been getting them.

My first thought was that this is a post office problem and she should talk to the branch in Chicago that delivers our mail. She said she had already talked to our female postal carrier. This baffled me because our mail carrier is a big hairy man.

The only indication this woman had that we weren't getting these mailings was that no one from my company had called the photographer to purchase his services. I asked if they had been addressed to anyone in particular, she said no.

After further discussion, I was able to conclude that these mailings weren't requested by anyone, they were just junk mail. The photographer wasn't receiving our business and assumed it was because we weren't getting his mailings (not because we weren't interested) and called his post office to fix the problem.

posted by youngergirl44 19 March | 18:02

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