through a similar “guess the gmail address from first and last” I was looped into a group email a few weeks ago letting me know that since my daughter was no longer in the green fleet, I was now eligible to be their skipper, and that we should all meet at the yacht club. I emailed back and thanked them but noted that the commute from New York to New Zealand might take a toll. I also slipped in that my wife happened to be a sailing instructor in New York. I ended with an apology for getting to the gmail address first. They thanked me for letting them know, gave me the name of the yacht club and said I was welcome to join anytime, and they’d put my wife on the roster 
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I used to get misdials for a local pizza place. Usually late on a work night.
A couple times when someone insisted that they had the right number, I took their order for delivery and let further calls go to the machine for the rest of the night.
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I, for one, do know everyone with the same area code as me…
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Yeah, more mean-spirited than funny sums it up nicely.
A little bit of screwing with a wrong number–especially when the person on the other end is a jerk and the stakes are low–is funny. But when someone in obvious emotional distress accidentally texts you, leading them on and on is pretty shitty. (Even if you do slip in the occasional half-assed “wrong number, btw” among the snark–as if you made a serious attempt at letting them know, so it’s all on them.)
Don’t know why the high crime of mistexting someone makes it okay to be an asshole to an evidently grief-ridden fellow human in a way we would never tolerate in other circumstances.
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To be fair, we only get a hint that Dawn or the texter are in any kind of trouble, and it’s after a dozen or more aggressive texts… all over the course of a half hour or so.
And even after “the turn” all the incoming texts are “fuck you” or “you’re a liar” or “you’ll get what’s coming to you.” I can’t say treating them this way was the classiest thing in the world, but I don’t feel like it was unwarranted, either.
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Couldn’t agree more. The sender of the texts never “got it” (i.e. got that she was being pranked) because the receiver never had the “big reveal”
The only way this ever would have been funny (and with this distressed person, that’s a big ‘if’) would be if he were to explicitly say: “Listen. I responded to your first text as a joke, even though you had the wrong number. My name is XXX (no last name), I"m a XXX (in which the profession is generic) and I am not whomever you think I am. This whole text is me messing with you and I don’t know these people”
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Reminds me of the time some guy typed a number into his phone wrong, and ended up with my number on some speed dial or something.
I start getting pocket dialed constantly. Like 8-10 calls, sometimes once a week, sometimes 2-3 days a week.
I send the guy text messages, I try talking on the phone to the guy a few times when he pocket dials, yelling loud enough that he realizes his phone is on.
So I finally get tired and call him up, because I’m pretty mad after a while.
I call him, he picks up:
Guy: “Hello?”
Me: “Stop calling me!”
Guy: “No, you called me!”
Me: “Look, I keep getting pocket dialed by you, check your call log. Stop calling me!”
Guy: (increasingly mad) “No, YOU called ME!”
This when on for a while, until he started to sound kinda freaked out. The calls stopped for a while.
About 3 months later, rinse and repeat the whole ordeal. Even that wasn’t the end of it. Again, the whole ordeal a year after that.
Thankfully modern phones make it easy to block calls.
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I wouldn’t have responded in the first place, even as a joke; you never know just how deep a “rabbit hole” goes, and I don’t deal with ‘crazy,’ period.
And if the person had kept texting after being ignored, I’d have blocked the number.
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Just respect his arthorrittair.
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This is very comforting, and I hope you’re right.
This was a fun read. However, might I make one slight suggestion: In the pics that include your texts, they seem to be white text in a green field. I say, “seem to be” because I have some minimal Tritonopia colorblindness. So, maybe it just looks like Green and white to me. Either way, it is super difficult to read.
In the future, could you switch that up in your settings somehow?
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I got a wrong number the other day. It had the same area code as the specialist I see, so I just picked it up. I got this angry guy on the phone instead. He started the call with, “Who the hell is this?!” I refused to answer, and asked who he was, instead several times. Apparently, “Mike” didn’t appreciate unknown calls on his girlfriends phone. He would not believe me when I saw I hadn’t been on the phone with anyone. I had a Minecraft emergency I was dealing with.
Turns out blocking numbers is super easy.
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Some very nice Canadians repeatedly invited me to some garden party in Canada for similar reasons. I sent them a very pleasant note telling them they had the wrong folk. And then it happened again about a year later. 
More recently, someone got a phone number in a different area code (though frightfully close to my own) which is otherwise identical to my work phone.
I’ve had their mom call me and leave an incomprehensible voicemail, texts from their optometrist, calls from a realtor, and even a call to pick up their dog from the groomer.
I don’t mess around with folks health stuff so I tried contacting the optometrist … number disconnected. The realtor sounded like some kind of web based thing so I didn’t even. I didn’t understand anything their mom said so I didn’t try calling the mom.
The groomer (who had a hilariously punny name) had a working voicemail. So I left one and said “hey, that was the wrong number but when [redacted] comes by to pick up [redacted] please let them know they’ve been giving out the wrong number to everyone.”
It’s been over a week since the groomer incident and I’ve only had one additional weird call so I think we’re past the hump on that one.
This kind of thing happens to me with some regularity. Often on numbers I’ve had for years.
But yeah when random non-medical, non-commercial people text me, I don’t engage unless it’s innocuous. 
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There’s a person with my name in Costa Rica with all kinds of interesting goings on that I hear about often since his cousin’s really bad at using address books. I reply each time so the other me gets his messages, but she still sends regular windows into other-me’s life. At this point I like other-me’s cousin since we wound up emailing back and forth about bird watching and things to do in Costa Rica.
I’m jealous of the other-me who was taking Tango classes in Buenos Aires and had two lady-friends who got his email address wrong, he seemed to be smooth with women in a way that’s utterly foreign to this me. The duck hunting other-me in Louisiana who somehow seems to think my email address is his so I get subscribed to duck hunting things and get order notifications about hunting jackets and things I’m less of a fan of.
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Sounds pretty charitable filling in the blanks in psychiatric interview series and/or grade 8 Kaw Sun Idi Language Arts. 
Ah yes, my name is pretty common, so I had to do something similar. And then I immediately started getting half a dozen emails a day from a woman in Texas who thought I was her daughter-in-law. “Inspirational” internet forwards, birthday greetings to children I didn’t have, etc. I kept telling her she had the wrong email, and she kept insisting this was her DILs.
Finally I hit reply-all on one of her religious spam forwards and said “Please will someone explain to this woman that I do not know her!”
I got an email from her, calling me rude, and an email from someone else who said “I don’t know who she is either!!!”
The really weird thing is, I have a gmail address that contains no part of my actual name, and yet I have gotten mistaken emails for other “Many Bells Downs” on that address. Like, Best Buy emailed me to say the credit card I had used for my new phone wasn’t valid. I thought it was a phish at first, but the email was no-reply and the phone number listed was valid. They’d somehow clicked the wrong one of my name in their database, apparently.
I’ve also gotten emails with insurance information for My Name too. I am 100% sure I’ve never had Blue Cross of Georgia so … so much for HIPAA, I guess.
Oh! and then there was the six years I spent getting calls on my landline for a different “M. Bellsdown” who apparently owned a house that contractors really REALLY wanted to work on. I was glad I was renting, because every single one of these contractors lied to me about how they’d gotten the number. Apparently there’s not an honest contractor in all of Los Angeles County.
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My wrong number story: http://www.gyrofrog.com/telephony_2012-09-04.php
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The only time that I had some fun was when some dude sent a booty call text to my phone… I only responded with Spiderman images - the only text I sent was the last one “tired g’night”. He seemed high as a kite, but probably had a laugh the following day - never got any blow-back.
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I really want to booty call you now actually.
… for Spiderman. Yeah, that’s why.
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