My kingdom for a rock

Since I moved to Decatur, I've had many interesting "wrong number" phone calls. Many of them are simple misdials, but several have been aimed at some person who had my number previously. I don't know Jesse Lockett, but he/she must lead a colorful life. For a while I was finding messages on my answering machine telling me someone was trying to place a collect call to me from a prison in south Alabama. I almost wish I'd been home to have taken one of those. I'll admit it, I was curious.

Now that I've had my phone number for a couple of years, though, those have slowed down. Pretty much the only guy left who calls looking for Jesse is one debt collector. Over the past year or so, though, I've had a series of wrong number messages that I just could not figure out. Every month or two I'd come home to find a message from someone in Maine wanting to ask questions about my rock shop -- I always assumed stones, not clangy guitars. Anyway, these people would leave long messages about burning rock issues they needed resolved. Two things led me to suspect these folks might have a few pebbles rolling around in their heads. First, they were calling from Maine and it was obvious they thought they were calling a rock shop in Maine, yet I obviously have an Alabama phone number. Second, my outgoing message on my answering machine is pretty clearly a private residence message, not a rock shop. I could write off one kook not putting those things together, but I was puzzled by the fact that I'd get calls from different folks over a long period of time. Hmm, ...

Well yesterday I sort of got an answer to the rocky issue. [Sorry, can't resist the puns.] I was sitting at home when the phone rang and I saw on the caller ID that it was a call from Maine. I decided not to answer, but as I listened to the message the caller was leaving I became intrigued. She said she was calling from somewhere in Maine and she needed to talk rocks because she was planning to do some sort of holistic fair in May and ... Well at that point I decided that I had to answer the call. I kind of got sidetracked and I never did find out just what goes on at a holistic fair in Maine, but I did get some insight as to why these folks are calling me.

This very nice lady said she found a phone number for this rock shop somewhere, but then she found a different number for it in the local yellow pages. Yet somehow her call got routed to Alabama rather than Maine. Okay, I thought, maybe she just misdialed, but like I said, this happens sort of frequently. I asked her for the number she'd dialed and she read it to me straight out of the phone book -- it was some 877 (toll free) number! Now I really don't think she (and numerous other Mainers) would misdial a number so badly that an 877 number becomes a 256 number, yet (some of?) those calls go to me. Though I now have a higher respect for the intelligence level of the folks in Maine, I really don't understand how this happens. The Maine lady had a possible explanation -- it must be a wire somewhere! Though simplistic, it's as good as any explanation I can come up with.

Unfortunately I didn't write down the number she dialed. I wish I had because I could maybe use it to get the phone companies to try to track down the source of the problem. As it's not a real inconvenience to me, though, I think I'd have been more likely to give it out to my long distance friends and see if they could use it to call me toll free. That'd be kind of cool, huh? Of course that'd mean I'd have to get some friends, but that's a minor detail. I'd kind of like to have my own toll free number.

Of course this could be a sign from above that I'm supposed to give up my current career path and go into the rock business. I think the frequency of the phone calls will have to pick up before I consider that seriously, but it is something to think about.