to think that if you ring a wrong number, you don't then ring it again another 3 times ?

[MrsMorgan]

This man first rang (my mobile) on Friday and asked for a man by name. I said they have the wrong number, and he read the number out to me. I said yes that is this number but it doesn't belong to that man.

Two minutes later he rings again and says he thinks he got the names mixed up and asks for another man. I said again that the phone belonged to me and not named man and i'd never heard of either person.

Nothing then, until today when it rings again and he asks for the same man as in the first call. I said 'no you still have the wrong number', he apologised and hung up, but then rang again asking for the same person. I said 'I just told you, you have the wrong number' and hung up.

AIBU to think that if you ring a number and it is wrong, you don't carry on ringing it ?

YANBU.

On Christmas Eve/early hours of Christmas morning some bloody stupid woman called our house number 5 or 6 times. It was obviously the wrong number. Despite being woken at 1.30am, I was polite the first time she called. By the end I was telling her to juft fuck off.

Why can't people just accept that if they call a number and whoever answers says it's the wrong number then it's. The. Wrong. Fucking. Number.

Omg this drives me mad. For five months, a man with little or no English has been calling our house, and asking for somebody whose name I can't even hear. When will he stop?! When he started calling at 3pm we unplugged the phone, and dread plugging it back in ever : ( tell your caller to delete your number from his records, and say you have reported to the phone company that he is harrassing you

Doh I mean 3am. 3am! Waking the freakin downstairs neighbours too! YADNBU

Oh I get it with the house phone too sometimes, and weirdly it stops for ages and then starts up again, with various people ringing asking for the same woman. It makes me lol when they sound so put out that I am not the person they want.

The mobile one freaked me a bit though, but if he does it again, I will tell him to stop ringing or I will report it.

someone rang the other day asking for the people who lived here before us (over 2 years ago)
I said "they don't live here anymore"]
"ok i'll call back later" and hung up before i could protest
and he did ring back later

We get loads of calls for them, and i also get "are you sure?" when i say they don't live here.
"oh no, you're right, here they are, camping in the garage"

I'd be tempted to pretend to be teh person just to see what happens.

Say he's passed away. That might work

I had a very weird wrong number once. Man called and asked to speak to [my name], I said that was me and he immediately started having a go at me for stalking/harassing a woman called Mel. It went on for ages and he wouldn't accept that I had no idea what he was going on about. Eventually I hung up on him. I was very shaken up and only afterwards got a bit spooked by him having asked for me by name. I stupidly rang him back to ask how he'd got my number, but he just started shouting and swearing at me and I had to hang up on him again.

Very scary, I saved his number in case he rang again, but he never did. Just a weird coincidence but I was freaked out by it for ages.

Lol redredwine. I would but knowing my luck it would backfire on me.

I also get people inc the police, knock my door looking for the previous residents. The police once banged on the door at 5am looking for one of them, and once we had proved who we were, he advised us to make sure we were on the electoral role. We were.

4 years on and again I had a policeman knock the door about two weeks ago, asking for this person again. I said, they didn't live here and hadn't for 6 years, and he looked at me like I was really making his day difficult. He looked me up and down and said i'd have to prove who I was, so I did. I told them that I thought by now they would have realised that the person really does not live here, and he said 'well I only go by whats on my bit of paper'.

yanbu at all this has happened to me several times by some posh old bloke who then gets really corss with me and starts interrogating me and i say i havent got time for this you have called me before its the wrong no. he is always adament i am lying and someething is afoot. in fact he is very very rude to me when he has called me. i now have him saved im my mobile as 'mad old man do not answer'!!!!

I had the wrong number from hell a few years ago. Woman was sure I was having an affair with her husband and kept ranting and raving got more and more abusive, 50+ calls. When my husband got home and she called he threatened to involve the police as she was becoming very agressive and abusive (thank god he trusts me!). Quite scary. She finally belived us-then called back to pour out her problems! Unplugged phone.

Several years ago I had a caller that left several messages on my mobile ...

all along the lines of I'm sorry please I want you back .. throught the please call me back so we can at least be friends through to .. right thats if you dont call me back its over... and finally thats it its over

I still wonder ocassionally if it was a genuine mistake or she gave him the brush off with a wrong number

YANBU

People keep ringing here and asking for a Miss X, only problem is the X is the same as my DH's first name so I often pass them over to him! Then they get all uppity... Once we had a school ring us to ask us to collect Miss X's poorly kid from school When I said they had the wrong number they kept asking me how they were going to get in touch with her then (um, well I don't know, try keeping your records up to date?) and questioning me, asking if I was sure and if there was anyone who could pick him up I did ask where the school was and pointed out I live about 200 miles away, but I still don't think they believed me. I don't understand how they think it is her number because it's been tied to this house for the last 12 years that I know of!

Every so often I get calls from various financial organisations asking for someone who must have once had the number. They read out the address once and it is somewhere in a different part of town. They always don't seem to believe me that he isn't here. I think he must owe them money.

For some reason, we get loads of phone calls from one of the wards at the local hospital. The number of phone calls asking if they can find out how June/Betty/Marjorie is now afterher operation. They sound so confused. bless them.

DP has left a message on the answerphone saying that this is the number for us and not the hospital but even that doesn't defeat some of them

We got a new number when we moved to our new house and it turned out it used to belong to a locksmith. He must have still been listed in the Yellow Pages or something so we often got calls from people asking us to unlock their cars etc.

Not a big problem but annoying, so we asked BT to change our number, which they did... to the number which used to belong to the Association for Continence Advice! This number is regularly given out to people on leaflets it would seem and we get a lot of calls from people, including a very posh old man who asked straight out for information on anal plugs. I have been very nice, found out the number for the Bowel and Bladder Foundation and give them that while trying to sound professional as it must be super embarrassing for them, but afterwards I do giggle. So far have resisted the almost overwhelming temptation to say "Can you hold?"

When I lived with my mum, there was a number misprinted in the local phone book which gave a company's phone number as ours. Jeez, we got so many calls for people wanting them after that it got ridiculous. My mum learned the real number and used to redirect them.

The funniest was just after they'd moved out, and forwarded all calls to her mobile for a few day until that number was reassigned. we were wandering around the supermarket and she got a call, and just said "Oh no, you want 'XXXYXX'" off the top of her head and hung up.

OP, YANBU. After one call he should have taken the hint. If he rings again tell him to delete the number as he was obviously given an incorrect contact.

Our number is the one a garage used to have, so I occasionally get calls to fix a car. Last time I said sorry, wrong number. Caller said "Oh, are you sure?" I replied "Oh! You know, I wondered what all these cars were doing here! When can I book you in?" I took the booking and never heard back.

We used to have a telephone number that had been given out wrongly in several places:

• as a eurostar info number - really did not appreciate the calls waking me up at silly o'clock asking what time the first eurostar of the day went or what time their train went

• as a trading desk at a City Bank - people used to ring up for currency prices or to do deals - got very hacked off when I told them they weren't talking to the right people. was very tempted just to say sold and leave them to sort out the pickle but eventually managed to get our number out of some list that had it in so the calls stopped.

• for somebody on the board of directors at a high st bank - during big takeovers. Bizarrely he had the same surname as my husband and people used to ring up leaving messages for MrShine without a first name, or saying what it was about or leaving a number to call back on so we were getting quite worried initially. Then it changed to messages about what lawyers thought or stuff that they needed so he wasn't doing stuff and people were getting annoyed because they thought he was ignoring them . It was having the same name that made it so confusing and so unlikely. When one of us was eventually in during the day to talk to somebody leaving the messages they got very embarassed about it but it still took a while for them to change the number in their listings.

Oh and we once also had somebody turn up at the flat who had come over from New York to work in the UK office for 6 months and had been told that our flat was the company flat and that she would be staying there for the next 6 months, along with one other person she didn't know. However this person was supposed to be letting her in. She arrived at 6am on a sunday morning, we'd had a really late night and were very unimpressed by a stranger buzzing to be let in and told her she had the wrong flat. She was convinced that she was right and that we were evil flatmates who wouldn't let her in and wouldn't stop buzzing. Eventually she got into the building and started hammering at the door, she still wouldn't believe dh that we had no idea who she was and didn't really want to let strangers into our flat just because they thought they lived there. Turned out she was supposed to be in the next door flat, only found out when the other person living next door came out to complain about all the noise waking him up on a sunday morning .

I recently had some weird phone calls from Nigeria, which I couldn't hear most of, but enough to hear I had been asked for by my first name, which was a bit scary. The next thing I knew, I had a text message - again to me by name - saying we had spent time together on MySpace a few years ago, and blah blah blah....

The coincidence of mobile phone number and name has got me a bit worried. Does anyone think this might be a scam? I daren't reply!

P.S. MrsMorgan, I got carried away with the other tales, and forgot to say YANBU - of course!

Ooh, I hate the times when my mobile rings, and someone asks for Simon*, and I say this isn't Simon's phone, I don't know a Simon, you have the wrong number. And I get 'are you sure?'. And on one occasion 'well is he anywhere close by?'.

Of course I'm sure. Do you think I go around answering random mobile phones for kicks?

Someone who sounded a lot like my mother rang my home phone a couple of years ago and started chatting away, as mothers do. So I chatted back, thinking she sounded a bit different, and after a couple of minutes she said 'sorry, hang on, is this Allie?' and since my name is Ellie, I thought bad line, and reassured her that it was, and the conversation went on another three or four minutes before we both figured it out. What are the odds.

*All names in this story have been changed.

I answered a call from a wrong number with a familiar voice, too, tortoise! The woman must have thought me daft, as she was after something professional, like the GP surgery, or the Council! Once we realised what was up, she was very polite to me.