After a year or so of fielding calls for for a Terry Barnes, who apparently owed a lot of people a lot of money, I finally gave in and changed our home number. I'm not talking about a few random calls, either. I've taken calls from collectors--lots of those--but also from a few attorneys' offices and once from a detective. He's the one who told me about the large civil suit. He also suggested that I change the phone number. At that point, I didn't think it was too much of a problem and--silly me--that eventually people would stop calling after a few repetitions of "I'm sorry, there's no Terry Barnes here. No, I'm not Mrs Barnes."
But at long last, I decided that enough was really enough, so I made the call.
The process was pretty easy, though I didn't realize that you could actually choose from a series of numbers. And because Robin from AT&T knew why I was changing the number, she searched for a while t0 find the one that had been out of service the longest.
One week after I changed the number, let our families know that we weren't hiding from them, and updated all of our contacts, it began anew.
"Hello? No, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number. No, there is no Mrs Baker here. Excuse me? (sigh) No, no Mr Baker, either."
6 comments:
There are probably multiple ways to change a number. It sounds like you did the change as if you were moving and wanted to keep the old one connected. Try calling the old one -- you may well get the 'this number has changed to NewNumber'.
Even though it would mean another round of change, call the phone company back and explain you want a completely new number not related in any way to the old number and ask specifically if they can do that.
In college once I had a number that matched a radio station calling itself KSOUL and if you tried to call with a zero (0) for the letter O you got me. If you dialed the number on the keypad for the letter O -- like the person JUST DID for the K and the S and the ... anyway, it got old quickly and thankfully I moved.
that's a good thought, but since they're now calling for a Mrs Baker instead of Mr Barnes, I think I just got lucky again :)
So much for my reading comprehension skills. That does sound like being doubly unlucky. Screen calls?
nah--i think i'll just try my sister's "thank god you called! the pigs are out!" :)
I have been taking calls for the deadbeat who had my number before for nearly 3 years now. Once there was even a message from "Mom"! What kind of jerk doesn't even tell Mom their new number?
hilarious! I hope you called "Mom" back and apologized ;)
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