Wrong Numbers

Taking a break from politics and encouraging people to vote, I had something happen today that is still making my blood boil. It's been a while since I've let something get to me this much, and I don't know why this is bothering me so much. Perhaps it's the underlying circumstance that brought me to this situation.

What situation? The obsession that people have with knowing who called them. Some may remember that I work in a hotel, so on any given weekend I have a half dozen calls from people saying, "Yeah...someone just called me from this number." I won't go into the semantics of even the depth of conversations I have with these people while explaining on why I can't help them, but I just don't understand why people are so hung up on finding out who called them. Before all of this technology with Caller ID, Voice Mail, and Cell Phones, no one was obsessed with who called them. In fact, it was an irritation to have been called accidentally...especially if you were expecting someone elses call.

You'd think, with everyone supposedly so busy as they are, they'd have better things to do than to obsess with every single call they get and/or miss. Any time I get a call from a number I don't recognize, I simply don't answer it. If it is someone I know, or if it was important enough, they will leave a voice mail. If not, I assume they have called a wrong number and will recognize that quickly enough once they get to my voice mail.

So the specific incident that has me all worked up today is I called an old friend today...or tried to. No one answered, and the call went over to voice mail...kinda(I actually got a recording saying that this person hasn't set up their voice mail yet). But before I hung up, I got an incoming call from the person I was calling. My initial thought was that maybe he got a new phone or something, thus the reason for me getting that voice mail message, and that he was just calling back. When I answered the phone, a voice on the other end was saying "I've got to figure out who this f*@#er is."

Slightly taken aback, because I quickly had a thought that my friend, who does cuss, may have been joking around with me since I hadn't talked to him in a long time, I again repeated, "Hello." I hadn't recognized the voice, as it was faint, but I thought it could have been him. But when I was met with a "Who's this?" I realized that it wasn't my friend, so I asked for him by his full name. The fellow on the other end of the line said I must have had the wrong number. I promptly apologized and then told him that there is no need to cuss at someone who merely accidentally called the wrong number. I didn't wait around for a response, as by this point I was rather mad.

I still don't know if I was more mad at the interaction with this gentleman, or at myself for not knowing that this friend of mine no longer had this phone number. I understand that he could have been having a bad day or something, and I'm all for giving the benefit of the doubt, but I think I still would have posted this man's name if I had been able to find it. There's no reason to treat people like that simply because they made the mistake of staying out of touch with his friend long enough that he didn't have the most recent cell phone number for him.