Attitude Problem

[omahas]

Every once in a while you have to deal with someone who really shouldn't be a member of the human race. Who really never learned the proper way to deal with other human beings. Who you really expect to win a Darwin Award some time soon.

Case in point:

We get phone calls on a regular basis for several different doctors. For some reason, our phone number is *still* linked to a variety of different doctors (I've heard three or four different doctors' names so far) because other physicians won't update their damned address books. It's been *four* years since we got this phone number! You'd think they'd have figured this out by now.

Anyway. I get this phone call today from this woman asking for this particular doctor. I'm tired of these calls, but I'm still polite. I tell her, "I'm sorry, but this is the wrong number."

She sighs dramatically, then says, "Well, this is the number they gave me," and rattles off the number which, like usual, is mine. I say, "yes, that's my number and it's not a doctor's office." I wasn't trying to be rude, and I wasn't being sarcastic, but I'm tired of the calls.

Her response was to say, "You bitch!" and hang up. Like it's all my fault that they gave her my phone number to harass me with.

Joy.

The next time I get one of these phone calls, I'm going to ask them where they got it from, then that number is going to get a harassing phone call from me.

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I can sympathize with you completely, Omaha; I've had to deal with that -- or similar idiocies -- for years now at work. Back when I worked at the Navy Personnel Research & Development Center (NPRDC), they did a major reshuffling of all the phone numbers on all the bases on Point Loma to make one unified system, which left me with the phone number that used to belong to S-3 (Supply) aboard whichever sub tender (the USS Dixon or the USS McKee) was in port at the sub base; three years after the change, I was still getting calls for them.

After I got shuffled to the Naval Medical Center San Diego, I got hit with a stupider version of the 'wrong phone number' problem. DoD has a second phone system, called AUTOVON, which allows military facilities to call each other without incurring long-distance charges. DFAS Cleveland (Defense Finance and Accounting Service -- pay handling for both civilian and military personnel) had two numbers -- a commercial phone number and an AUTOVON number. If you dialed their commercial phone number on AUTOVON, however, you got my desk. This went on for five years, getting between one and five calls for DFAS Cleveland a day, until I moved to another office, and elected not to take my phone number with me. (And it was clearly stupid-user syndrome, too; all of the DFAS Cleveland paperwork, and their website, clearly labelled their commercial and AUTOVON numbers.)

That didn't help, however. I've discovered that my current office phone number, if you swap the last two numbers of the prefix (523 vs. 532), is the same as the number for the San Diego Food Bank. Fortunately, I'm only getting about one call a week wrong at this number, which is some kind of improvement...

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

I love my caller ID.

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

My phone number got listed on a web site associated with some sort of wine thing, and people got very pissy at *me* when *I* didn't know the number they were supposed to be calling.