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Phone Weirdness

GingerTabby said:
When I moved into my current home some years ago I was assigned a new telephone number. A few weeks after the move I began to receive calls from people who were convinced that my new number belonged to the office of a high court judge. There were only about three callers in total, if I recall correctly. I assured them that unless someone was living in the spare bedroom without my knowledge there was no judge on the premises.
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Maybe you could have been this a man!

Roybean2.jpg




erm judge roy bean...
 
^^:D I wouldn't want to be a horse thief who appeared in this man's "court"!
 
I assured them that unless someone was living in the spare bedroom without my knowledge there was no judge on the premises.
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For a good 15 years or so I used to get wrong numbers where the person would inevitably ask if this was 'Vincent Bearings'... one every week or two.

No idea if it's stopped as I'm not at home in office hours these days and often don't bother answering the landline when I am.
 
pornosonic1975 said:
An ex girlfriend is one of three sisters, the youngest of which sadly died in her 30's about seven years ago.

Both she and her other living sister confirm that a short time after the death of their sister that they were on the phone chatting and then all of a sudden, the phone conversation got filled with static. However amid the static, their deceased sister came on the line and said "I'll be alright" before fading away!

These are highly credible, decent people and I have no reason to doubt their story.
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Shiver down spine.
 
I had one of the Microsoft scam calls from India recently, not a rare occurrence but the nature of this one was somewhat bizarre.
I'd had quite a few of these calls in the last few days, toldhim to bogg off and ended the call. Three seconds later it rings again and on the other end is my friend from Indian Microsoft telling me what he'd do to me and my daughter! (Don't have a daughter)
Without thinking I just told him I'd give it a miss thanks because his sister said his nob smells, I ended up spending 15 minutes trading insults with the whole call centre! (Four guys in a room with phones)
we've got a call blocker now, can't risk one of the kids picking up one of those.. but that was the most bizarre scam call I ever had.
 
I felt a bit that way myself! After the initial shock my inner evil streak kicked in..no way were they getting off with being so rude!
 
I had a call some months back from an investment company suggesting I might like to invest in a couple of companies they're recommending. I decided to waste a bit of their time so I humoured the guy & said send me details & I'll have a look, which they did.

On doing some research on the recommended companies & the investment brokers themselves [who had a Canary Wharf mailing address but appeared to be actually based in Ilford] I made a list of the various reasons why I wouldn't be investing. They phoned me back a couple of days later & I gave them chapter & verse on why I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.

The day following the same guy rang again - I recognised his voice - exclaimed "you fat old cunt" then put the phone down on me. Well he was right on 2 counts. I'm not fat.
 
That's the way to do it! :D
 
Remember before the digital age and we used to get crossed lines? You could hear other conversations and people dialling out and stuff?

Well that happened to me on a phone call the other week! I was on the landline, the person calling me was on her mobile. I kept hearing someone trying to dial (the old fashioned way, finger in the hole and dialling anti-clockwise) and a faint woman's voice. She sounded foreign, Indian maybe (I am in the UK).

I thought that couldn't happen any more on digital. It got so distracting we had to cut the call and she had to ring me on my mobile. She had heard the voice but not the dialling sound. Took me right back back to the 1980s!
 
Scribbles said:
Well that happened to me on a phone call the other week! I was on the landline, the person calling me was on her mobile. I kept hearing someone trying to dial (the old fashioned way, finger in the hole and dialling anti-clockwise)...
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It may be decades since I used one, but I think you mean dialling clockwise...

Trouble is, people with mobiles don't have wristwatches anymore, and forget the difference between CW and ACW!

Here's an old style phone. Clearly, it can only be dialled CW.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukenicolaides/9045465622/

Note where the '9' is - part of the reason for the UK emergency number being '999' is that it's unlikely to be dialled accidentally.
 
rynner2 said:
Note where the '9' is - part of the reason for the UK emergency number being '999' is that it's unlikely to be dialled accidentally.
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I thought it was different although like most people it's been a few years since I saw one.

I thought that the 9 was closest to the stopper thingy, so that 999 was quicker to call, it being an emergency number, than 111.
 
I've been getting weird silence-then-hang-up calls for some time and it had been creeping me out. Then a couple of weeks back, a lengthy silence was broken with my father in law - who is in his 80s and has dementia - spewing out a hate filled rant about my husband and why he never visits him. I was so shocked I just quietly replaced the receiver. Am fairly sure now all the creepy phone calls were him. Not his fault, the dementia. I never even bothered to do 1471, must admit, so the mystery would have been solved sooner if I had. (Usually they happen early afternoon and I am too busy to stand around messing with the phone). I haven't told my husband - he'd be too upset by it. That's the kind of mundane explanation that probably accounts for a lot of phone weirdness, though...
 
"In order to find the new emergency number in the dark or thick smoke it was suggested an end number was used so it could be found easily by touch.

111 was rejected because it could be triggered by faulty equipment or lines rubbing together. 222 would have connected to the Abbey local telephone exchange as numbers in the early telephone network represented the first three letters (ABBey = 222, 1 was not used due to the accidental triggering). 000 could not be used as the first 0 would have dialled the operator.

999 was deemed the sensible choice."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8675000/8675199.stm
 
rynner2 said:
It may be decades since I used one, but I think you mean dialling clockwise...

Trouble is, people with mobiles don't have wristwatches anymore, and forget the difference between CW and ACW!

Here's an old style phone. Clearly, it can only be dialled CW.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lukenicolaides/9045465622/

Note where the '9' is - part of the reason for the UK emergency number being '999' is that it's unlikely to be dialled accidentally.
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Yeah, I meant clockwise.
 
Yup, before mobile phones arrived there used to be people who called themselves 'phreaks', who were adept at re-routing phone calls all around the world and listening into conversations in foreign countries an' all sorts.
 
escargot1 said:
Yup, before mobile phones arrived there used to be people who called themselves 'phreaks', who were adept at re-routing phone calls all around the world and listening into conversations in foreign countries an' all sorts.
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I was a victim of that once.
I answered the phone, and a foreign-sounding woman also answered. She seemed to think I'd phoned her.
I said 'no, you phoned me'. Then she got angry!
I hung up ASAP because I thought it might be an international call costing me lots of money.
 
I once had a phone call at about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and let it go to answering service because I was nervous what it might be. On listening to the message it was an angry-sounding foreign man (possibly southern Asian) ranting for a minute until he put the phone down. He never called back, and I had no idea what he was so upset about.
 
Yup, before mobile phones arrived there used to be people who called themselves 'phreaks', who were adept at re-routing phone calls all around the world and listening into conversations in foreign countries an' all sorts.
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I never really got to the bottom of what phone phreaks really did.

The only trick I ever found out about was one that only worked when there was a local dialing code for adjacent areas that was cheaper than using the city/region dialing code... apparently you could string the local codes together like a sort of bridge to call another city or region at the local rate.

I think I just made it sound really gripping. o_O
 
escargot1 said:
Yup, before mobile phones arrived there used to be people who called themselves 'phreaks', who were adept at re-routing phone calls all around the world and listening into conversations in foreign countries an' all sorts.
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Yeah wasn't it the Apple dude?
 
Re; phone phreaking -
Great program about the origins of phone phreaking, Captain Crunch, et al.


This is one of my favorites, even though I know next to nothing about computers and even less about hacking. :)
 
Some unknown person recently had a little phone weirdness, courtesy of my husband.

He was texting a friend the other night and wrote "I'm wearing my wife's underwear and watching Bubble Guppies. I thought of you and got a little misty."

A text came back saying "who is this?"

Turns out he'd texted his friend's old number, not his new one. :oops: OH sent a text back saying "oops, wrong number" and added a "haha" at the end to hopefully dispell any worries that the unknown person was being stalked by a madman. Still, I can't help but wonder what the other person was thinking!

(BTW, he was not wearing my underwear - that's just his own special sense of humor :rolleyes:)
 
I've been responsible for a few weird, late night phone calls. When I was in school (around 13 years old) we used to hang around outside the local shops at lunch time. There was a pay phone there. I used to know a special number which when dialled connected you free of charge to the USA. It was a massive number and then the end few digits could be changed. I don't even remember how I came to know it.

We would call random numbers (sometimes they wouldn't connect but often they did) and be constantly waking people up who I presume (thinking about the time difference) were on the West Coast? We would just laugh or say rude words at them. Oh, the joy of being young and stupid.
 
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