Once my friend got a misplaced call, and the other guy started yelling "I know he's there! Stop protecting him! Why are you protecting him! I WILL F-ING KILL YOU!". The caller also retried two other times.

Ok, my wrong numbers are more sad than funny.

1) an elderly woman, who according to phone records lives in a hospice calls me and my mother (!? - this may be because my mother is listed on both numbers) asking for her daughter. She sounds confused and lonely and sometimes talks with my mother for extended periods of time (We were initially concerned that she might be alone and i need of assistance). She now seems to recognise us and asks us how we are and if we've seen her daughter recently. She hasn't seen her daughter since the seventies she's told us.

2) an arabic child, no older than maybe four years old called a lot, like four five times a day in rapid succesion, we realized that we were on speed dial on that home phone and soon figured out that our number was one digit off from an embassy that might need to be on that families speed dial. Have you ever tried to look up how to say "give your mommie the phone" in arabic? Whenever mom did get the phone she sorta yelped like she didn't know what a phone was a hung up before we had a chance to talk to her. After a few weeks the dad was given the phone and when we explained that their little boy had speed dialed us many times in the past, and it might be a good idea to remove the speed dialling from said phone or keep it away from the kid in some other manner he got really abusive toward us. That was fun.

qvantamon and dabitch provide excellent examples of a strange human phenomenon wherein the more wrong a person is the angrier they get at whomever had the temerity to point it out.

Observe this trait in action during your daily commute.

trinity8: or, y'know, become a full-time bicycle commuter... o_O

at my old shared intern-cubicle desk I used to get any number of endearingly misguided calls - sales guys, vendors, random wingnuts, parents-of-interns, roommates, etc... Depending on context and the caller's/recipient's desire, need or tolerance for practical joking/abuse, they could get fun to hand around amongst the lab assistants / interns working in the area. A favoured standby was to answer with stuff like "HotBodies Gentleman's Club" upon recognising someone's roommate's Caller ID, etc...

Now that I'm some kind of Actual Person with a Real Office and Serious Job, I only get Real Work-Related Phonecalls, to which I must answer "Legal Department, this is lfr...". It's very disappointing. Some days I go downstairs and bug the interns to see if any good games of Musical Phone have occurred.

I was recently frustrated just by returning a call. My ex-husband made a rare call to my cell. But I was in a bad area, and couldn't pick up the phone. He left a message; I hit the "Return Sender's Call" button barely two minutes after he called. The people who picked up claimed not to know whom I was referring to. "Come on," I said, "He just called from this number not even five minutes ago." But they played dumb. "Nope, no idea who you're talking about." Aaarrgghhh.

I did once have a wrong number where the caller sounded like a friend, I sounded like his friend, and we talked for about five minutes until we figured it out. Then we talked for 45 minutes more! Never did lead anywhere, but it was fun.

Ahh, wrong numbers. Accusatory tones implying you answered the wrong phone (how dare you?!)

I like to think of the angry response as more of a "shooting the messenger," since more often than not it means the person they are trying to contact gave them the WRONG number and now they have no way to contact them.

My favorite was (similar to qvantamon's) the girl thinking she was calling some guy, and of course I was the strange woman's voice answering "his" phone. And it couldn't be a wrong number, because that's exactly what the OTHER WOMAN would say. She kept calling, and just did not get it.

My work phone is one number off from the number of the undergraduate admissions office at my large, well-known, and relatively selective public university. Said admissions office never actually answers their phone. You can wait through a very polite hold system which informs you how many callers there are ahead of you, and after you're down to one, it cuts you off. This doesn't do much for the mood of the people who get through to me by mistake.

If they're still nice to me after all that, I give them whatever help and sympathy I can.

Just remembered something...

Some girl calls me (on my cell) and starts a "who are you", "who is the owner of this phone" routine. I ask who wants to know, and eventually she says "Someone I know got a call from this number at 3am last night". I tell her she had the wrong number, she insists that this is the number on the call log. I eventually hang up. Some time later, her brother calls, asking who this is, and why I'm calling people at 3am. I say he really got the wrong person, he starts with the "who owns this phone? I know that's not your phone" routine again. I tell him to fuck off and hang up again.

I get a third call from the girl, and then I remember - I was on antibiotics and set my phone alarm to 3am to take the pill. I check it out, and yeah, I had sleep dialed my friend while turning off the alarm. Turns out my friend still had my old phone in his contact list (I had just moved to a different area code), and his girlfriend saw the unknown number in his call logs, and then "obviously" this is his lover's phone and I'm covering up for her. I confirm it's her, explain the whole situation (except for my conclusions regarding her paranoia), she gives some embarassed excuse, etc, etc.

I wish I knew Spanish for "sorry, wrong number."

The only right reply to "HOOZISS?!" is "Vlad Tepes. And you are?"

I got a wrong-number text last week accusing me of skimping out on an agreement to buy a certain amount of Cosmetics in exchange for a discount, or something. It was sort of bizarre and full of acronyms that I had to decypher, so it was hard at first to tell if it was actually for me or not.

My most recent wrong number text was: did you get it? are we on?

I replied: the eagle has landed.

Hehehe.