Twits of Telephony, or 'NO! I AM NOT ALEXANDER!!'

Today I have decided to change my landline number. I am moving to a new flat soon, and had been toying with the idea of trying to take my phone number with me so I wouldn't have to get used to a new one. I am now distinctly not toying with that idea. That idea is now been firmly locked in the toybox, with ten padlocks and a fat Rottweiler sitting on top. This is because I have recently received a deluge of answerphone messages from people clearly under the impression that they are leaving a message for someone who IS NOT HERE. Often, said messages are in interesting languages or accents, but are thus indecipherable and therefore simply require immediate deletion.

There was the mad old Irish lady who rambled on for a good five minutes about wanting to close her building society account (at least I think that's what she was saying; I'm pretty sure she was drunk, too). I felt quite sorry for her, as she'd obviously poured out everything she wanted to say to the building society in this message, and it was never going to be heard by them. To be honest, it wouldn't have been much use even if she had got through to their voicemail instead of mine, as she wittered on so much that she forgot to leave her name and number. It was like some sort of tragic romance of missed connections. 'The Old Drunk and the Building Society'. Very Mills & Boone.

Then there was the woman who was trying to call someone named Robert Ayre. I've had a few calls for this guy, so I assume he's either lived here at some point in the past, or he's gleefully handing out a fake number to people he doesn't want to talk to, and it just happens to be mine. Perhaps I was unwittingly employed as his own personal 'flirt divert'. Either way, this one woman called, asked for him, and politely apologised when I explained that she had the wrong number. She then instantly redialled the same number, and got me again. I explained her mistake again, and she apologised a little more impatiently, and hung up. At this point, most people would have realised that the number they had written down was not correct, and either given up or resorted to one of the many other avenues of communication that technology has granted us. But not this lady. She knew who she wanted to speak to, and she had written down this exact number, so she was going to keep calling it until Robert Ayre had the decency to drop by and answer it, goddamnit! I ended up explaining to her that, no matter how many times she called this number, Robert Ayre simply wasn't going to pick up. And politely asked her to stop trying, as it was buggering up my Michael Cera marathon. And nobody should EVER obstruct the watching of Michael Cera movies. The phone rang again two minutes later. I picked it up and immediately hung up again.

I'll never understand the tenacity of people who are convinced that your phone number belongs to someone else, with whom they need to get in touch. I used to get a very old woman calling me at around 3am, asking for Alexander. I don't know why she would repeatedly call Alexander at 3am, but I don't blame him for giving her a fake number if that's what she's likely to do with it! Even more than the antisocial hour, I was more pissed off by the fact that, after I answered, she'd always begin her call with 'Is that Alexander?'. Do I bloody well sound like an Alexander?? I know I don't exactly have a chipmunk voice, but I was a bit offended that she'd hear my voice and instantly think 'Ah yes, clearly a bloke'! I had to work hard to stave off the potential tranny-voice-complex that she could have sparked off there. Anyway, I explained on about six separate occasions that she had the wrong number, and ended up almost begging her to stop calling because I had to be up early in the mornings! After that, I just did my instant hang-up trick, and that seemed to finally get the message across.

Today's answerphone messages (the inspiration for this post) struck me as being particularly silly. I had two messages, presumably left while I was at work, from a woman who seemed to think I was an office of some kind. She was trying to speak to somebody named 'Ian'. Obviously she saw through my ruse of setting up an answerphone clearly stating YOU HAVE REACHED ELLEN GALLAGHER, PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE AND I'LL GET BACK TO YOU AS SOON AS I CAN, and realised that I am in fact a business office with an employee named Ian. That doesn't answer its phones during business hours and instead lets you go to answerphone. Twice. Dang, I hate when people see through my attempts to disguise my secret business as a private address!

**UPDATE** Part 2 of this insanity here