Wrong Number!

Mobile phones, whilst offering us a very personal connection to the rest of the world, have also brought their own peculiar wahala. Nearly everyone has sent text messages to the wrong people or received messages clearly meant for others.

A friend of mine had some explaining to do when she accidentally sent a message complaining about her landlady to the landlady herself, and the same thing happened to me several years ago when I was at a crossroads regarding a relationship.

I needed advice from a close female friend but sent the message detailing all my boyfriend's dreadful behaviour to - you guessed it - the boyfriend in question.

At the end of the message, I wrote: ‘Wht shld I do, end it or wait 2 c if thngs improv?' I was confused, then shocked, and then overwhelmingly embarrassed when a message beeped in from the boyfriend, saying: ‘If he's so badly behaved you should end it.' At least he had a sense of humour.

In case you're wondering, the guy is married now and certainly not to me.

The other day it happened again; this time I got a message saying ‘Happy 40th birthday darling!' There was also a long prayer for good health and all that, which I rather appreciated, except that it wasn't my birthday and I'm still on the youthful side of 35. ‘Thank you for the prayers' I texted back, ‘but I'm nowhere near 40 - who is this?'

There was no reply to this day. If by coincidence the person who sent me that text reads this, my question to you is: if someone is truly your darling, how come you don't have their number saved on your phone?

Then there are those loonies who call and don't say anything. For weeks, I endured regular calls from a strange number; when I answered there would be no response but I could always hear a TV or a child or some other background noise. At first I thought there was a network problem or someone dialled my number by mistake or a child was fiddling with their phone...but after a while it struck me that it was deliberate, because anyone with genuine intentions would have sent me a text message by now.

When this sort of ‘mobile stalking' occurs, the first likely reaction is to be fearful and paranoid but it doesn't bother me at all; I take it as the downside of handing out business cards - you never know where your number is going to end up - so I've saved the stalker's number as ‘Ignore. '

And then there are the ‘Wrong number' situations everyone has experienced, which are annoying at the time but amusing in retrospect. Your phone rings, you've got both hands on your computer keyboard but you somehow manage to answer it.

Hello? Then a stranger at the other end yells "Bartholomew!" in your ear. It rings again, you dash out of a meeting - this could be the call you've been expecting - then: "Shamsudeen?"

There was a time when I kept getting calls from an elderly woman who had a nice soft voice. "Biodun?," she would say, before I even had the chance to say hello. I told her she had the wrong number several times over the two-week period that she kept calling, but she wouldn't give up. Sometimes she'd use other numbers and other times she'd get someone else to call and say the most annoying phrase in telecommunication: "hold on for your caller."

Each time ‘my caller' came on the line, it was her. ‘You have the wrong number ma' I would say, patiently and politely. Then one night, she lost her temper and her soft voice hardened. "Let me speak to my son!," she screamed. My jaw dropped and I removed my phone from my ear to look closely at it. Why do people do that by the way? Is it to confirm that it really IS your phone? Anyway, I put my phone back to my ear, catching the tail end of a stream of abuses before she concluded with "Why won't you won't let me speak to my son you wicked woman" before hanging up. I haven't heard from her since and I genuinely hope she finally got to speak to Biodun.