Take That, Suckers

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Well, if it's the wrong number, why did you answer the phone, you idio – LaughingStock

As you may know, I occasionally join in with the weekly Writer’s Workshop, which is hosted by John Holton. One of his suggested topics this week is to write about a wrong number telephone call we have either made or received, which is actually a reprise of a prompt that he ran nearly two years ago, and for which I wrote my first Writer’s Workshop post. It was a story from my past, and as it was well received I thought I’d do a little reprise of my own and share an edited version of it today. Many of you have joined me since then and won’t have seen this before – for the rest of you, it is a second chance to admire my talents (!).

I got married in August 1975, and we were lucky enough to be able to rent a flat from our local council to make our first home. It came with a telephone connection and handset already installed – not a given in those days – and whilst we enjoyed being able to use it we began receiving a load of calls from people thinking we were someone else. I asked one of them who he wanted, and it turned out that it was a hotel near Stansted Airport, about fifteen miles from our home. Back then there was no internet with readily available information at our fingertips, so we had to do a little detective work. The library couldn’t help much, but a local travel agent gave us a copy of a promotional brochure that the hotel published. We could tell from this that there were similarities in the numbers – in fact, it was the same area code and our number, although elsewhere in the brochure they also gave their correct number! We rang them to ask them to correct the error and republish the leaflet, but they didn’t seem inclined to do anything. So we wrote to them – and I’m still awaiting a reply to my letter. Perhaps after 50 years I should give up hope?

The calls kept coming through, around one or two a month, and most people could be persuaded to look at the other part of the brochure and call the right number. Some were more insistent, though, and I was once accused of lying! So Plan B formed in my mind. I think I did this a couple of times when people wouldn’t take no for an answer: I took their booking. I was hoping that guests turning up without a booking, who thought they had one, would persuade the hotel to extract their corporate digit, but we still got them. Then one day when I was at home on my own, I took this to another level.

Several of the calls we had received in previous months had been from a Swedish airline booking accommodation for their staff on a layover from the airport. I had told them every time that they had the wrong number, and usually just put the phone down on them. This time was different! Memory is a little hazy on the details but this is the gist of the conversation:

Caller: I’d like to book a room for our pilot and co-pilot, please.

Me: Would that be one room or two?

Caller: Just one.

Me: Are they good friends?

Caller: What do you mean?

Me: Do they need a double or twin room?

Caller: Twin please.

We went through the details of the ‘booking’ and then I dropped in my coup de grâce:

Me: Would your pilots like to avail themselves of our extra service?

Caller: What service?

Me: This is a very discreet service that we only offer to certain guests, but we can arrange for company to be provided to cater for any further needs your pilots might have.

Caller; You mean…

Me: Yes, anything they would like.

Caller: I don’t think that would be appropriate. They are both happily married men.

By this point I was having difficulty stifling laughter at the way this was all being taken as a serious conversation, but I managed to keep it together long enough to complete the ‘booking.’ I thought that I might get an irate call from the hotel at some point, but we never did hear from them. Funnily enough, though, we didn’t get any more calls from the airline after that, so maybe the krona had finally dropped? Or maybe they were so offended that they took their business elsewhere? To be honest, I couldn’t have cared less! Nor did we get any more wrong number calls from anyone else for the hotel, so maybe they had finally done something about it.

I told my wife about this when she got home and her reaction varied between horror and amusement at what I had done. But as it seemed to finally bring an end to the wrong number calls we came to agree that it had been worthwhile. And I really did enjoy doing it!

The first time I told this story I did it without a tune to illustrate it, but I’m going to play one today. The official video for this is restricted in some countries, so I’m going with this unofficial one, with a lady of equal beauty to Debbie Harry. Call Me, if you dare:

See you again for Song Lyric Sunday 😊🎶

51 thoughts on “Take That, Suckers”

  4. Great fun, I can just imagine the confusion of guests and staff over the non booking. In the late seventies our police flat had the phone in the very cold hall. One evening it rang and the operator said ‘Will you accept a call from The Falklands.’ At the time most of us had never heard of such a place and we also worried we were expected to pay for the call. Tuned out it was my brother in law, who was in the Royal Marines. We knew he was in the South Atlantic, that’s why he hadn’t come to our wedding, but no idea what he was doing there . We didn’t have to pay for the call.

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    • We’d taken several ‘bookings’ before that one, and could never work out why the hotel hadn’t done anything about it. They deserved all we gave them!

      Must have been scary times for your family back then – I just hope his tour of duty had finished before the war!

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  7. I enjoyed your story and sense of humor, Clive. One of my buddies has a routine I that he uses on telemarketers that I enjoyed watching once. He pretends to show great enthusisam to the sales pitch. After a bit he stops the salesperson and says, “This is so interesting! I really want to know more. Could you give me your home phone and I’ll call you later tonight?” He says usually there is silence on the other end of the line.

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    • Thanks! Thats how I figured it too. This went on for months and we gave them plenty of time to fix it. What I never understood was why, having been told that their brochure contained a wrong contact number, they didn’t change it. I had fun with this though 👍

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  17. That is a very funny story. I wrote a similar one, about my teenage daughter taking the order for a Chinese Restaurant with a similar number as ours. She was tired of answering the wrong number, so took the order.

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