Dammit, "Greg", pay for your fucking boat!

[Kitsa]

A few months ago, probably starting around September, I started getting these calls on my cellphone. At first they were real human beings, and they asked if they could speak to Greg. I told them they had the wrong number and they thanked me and hung up. I didn't think much of it back then.

Then the calls amped up a bit. They were still human, they identified themselves as being from some organization I regrettably can't remember the name of, and they said they needed to talk to Greg. I said sorry, you must have the wrong number, no Greg here. They usually elaborated, after I told them they had the wrong number, that they needed to speak with him regarding his boat. His boat? I said, sorry, I don't know any Gregs with boats.

After being pestered with these calls for a week or so, it occurred to me to tell them to please stop calling me. Right when I made up my mind to do it, the calls stopped coming from human beings I could talk to. Sometimes it was a machine right away, sometimes it was a person who just said, "Greg?" or "hold please" when I picked up and then transferred it to a machine.

The machine messages are more or less the same, and they never give a name, address or phone number of anyone I can contact. Each time it's like it's cut off and doesn't really give any useful information whatsoever. They go more or less like this....

"....message with important infor-MA-tion regarding your account. Your PAY-ment is now past DUE. PLEASE send your PAY-ment."

It doesn't say where the payment should go, who wants it, or where to contact them. It's like the message is cut off at both ends.

Look at the caller ID, you say. Yes, I thought of that. It comes up as UNKNOWN with no number. My cell refuses to call back an UNKNOWN. I look through my call history and it looks like this:

UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
mom
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
vet
UNKNOWN

I don't want to change my number because of this crap. But it won't let me block calls from UNKNOWN and I can't get a real human anymore to tell them to leave me the hell alone.


Ideas?

[Jeanette X]

No idea. It does remind me of the some calls I once received:

*phone rings*

Me: "Hello?"
Lady: *Spanish spoken really quickly*
Me:"I don't speak Spanish, you have the wrong number."
Lady: "Que?"..."Que?" *resumes volley of high speed Spanish*
Me: "I DON'T SPEAK SPANISH, YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER."
Lady: "Que?"..."Que?" *resumes volley of high speed Spanish*
Me: "NO! NO HABLO ESPANOL! INCORRECTO NUMERO!"
*hangs up*

*phone rings*
Me: "Hello?"
Lady: *Spanish spoken really quickly*
Me: "NO! NO HABLO ESPANOL! INCORRECTO NUMERO!"
*hangs up*

This happened two or three times until it stopped.

[ElPila666]

The lady was equivocated :P

[executioneer]

you should be able to block all calls with no caller ID information, i think you just have to talk to your phone company anyone calling from a blocked line will have to dial *86 i think it is and enter a phone # before calling

[Colonel Flagg]

This reminds me of grad school in Philly, when I began receiving calls from some lady in Northern Liberties asking for Gary. She did this about 2-3 times a DAY for about a month. Each time I explained that I was not Gary, had never been Gary, and was probably not likely to be Gary the next time she called. She would invariably apologize and hang up. AND CALL AGAIN ABOUT 3 HOURS LATER.

This was long ago, in the days before cell phones and caller ID.

I have no idea what to do about your problem, except to change your number or block the unknown caller (á la Willie's suggestion above).

[MetalMilitia]

Maybe this is a practical joke House was playing on Wilson but he got the wrong number.

Anyway - apparently the people that lived in this flat before me was shit at paying bills because we've had a lot of things like this. An automated caller thing would phone up and say "if you are MR SMITH please press 1, if not press 2". When you pressed 2 it disconnected you so in the end I just pressed 1 and told them to take me the fuck off their call list - which worked. Though it doesn't sound like you have this option.

Maybe phone your phone company and tell them your problem and they'll be able to sort it out in some fashion.

[Tadao]

Does your phone number stay with your address in Great Britain?

[MetalMilitia]

No, but I guess the debt collectors just look up our address in some database and it links to our new phone number.

[Tadao]

Oh, ok. I guess I'll just continue to stalk over here for the time being then.

[Archduke Tips]

I get the occasional call for "Susan" from debt collectors. I just tell them I am not Susan and that she doesn't own the phone anymore. I don't get pestered by them too often.

Sometimes I have debt collectors come to the door for the guy who lived there before me. Most of them don't come back. I think it is when they meet my pitbull that they make that decision. (Also, I imagine when they don't find his car they figure he must be gone... that's what they are looking for.)

[Sacks]

Check my machine on Friday there were 22 messages
Man, I can't win at this
One said this is for the kid living with Shaniqua
you want that chick you can keep her
Will this ever cease
So I can't get some sleep
Shaniqua moved out
Leave your message at the beep (beeeeep)
Yo, Shaniqua I love you, call me
Shaniqua don't live here no more
Shaniqua don't live here no more
Shaniqua don't live here no more
Is Shaniqua there?
HELL NO!

[WhiteRat]

Great track and a great album.

[darkvare]

me and some friends were on a car on our way to downtown. The phone of one of my friends rings so he answers, after explaining where he is hangs up i asked him who called and he says "i don't know some woman looking for a doctor i told her to meet next to the park"

[AChimp]

If you're getting harassing phone calls, you can probably call the cops and tell them that the voice is threatening you or something. :/

I was getting calls from 00-000-0000 for a while. It was a really bad recording telling me that I won a trip to Cuba or something. A lot of people I know were getting them, too. It turns out what happened was this: Canada introduced a national do-not-call list which pretty much everyone signed up for. Then telemarketers took the list and used it as a list of valid phone numbers to call by blocking their number.

[Zomboid]

hahaha I got a call from that number today. It was some stupid survey. I'm just gonna go ahead and keep not answering my phone when I don't recognize the number.

[WhiteRat]

I've been getting a lot of telemarketing calls from Canada lately, specifically New Brunswick. The first time they called it went like this:

Recording: "Please stay on the line for a chance to reduce your rate"

(I just got a new credit card so I figured, hey, what the hell, i'll see who this is)

Woman: Hi! Can you verify your phone number, name, and address?

Me: Who is this?

Woman: Sir, can you verify this information for me?

Me: Only if you tell me who you are first since you were the one that called me.

Woman: (nasty attitude) Ha! Actually, you called ME because YOU stayed on the line!

Me: Who the hell is this?

Woman: Ha! Fuck! (either that or suck, it was muffled as she hung up the phone).

Recently i've been getting calls from New Brunswick telling me to sign up for an extended warranty on my car. Funny, my 95 Camry doesn't and has never had one.

[Tadao]

The warranty calls were a curse in California during Sept-Nov. 1 a day at the least. Thank god they seamed to move on.

[WhiteRat]

This is a great site to check out when you start getting mysterious numbers. Anytime I get a weird number I look it up on here:

http://whocallsme.com/default.aspx

[Tadao]

Jen - 12 minutes ago
This needs to be stopped. I'm 15 and I recieved this call on my personal cell phone. It's scary getting a call from a number that's very unfimilar. I've been called multiple times, and it's getting old real quick.

[executioneer]

whocalled.us is better

[WhiteRat]

my dick is bigger than yours!

[executioneer]

PROBABLY YEAH SO

[ZeldaQueen]

Apparently in the phone book our number was right next to some Chinese restaurant's number, so for a while we'd get callers trying to find out how to get to the restaurant.

Actually, Kitsa your story kind of reminds me of one that humor columnist Dave Barry wrote about. He said that this guy kept getting a mysterious phone call where no one said anything. He answered the phone, there was a tone, and it hung up. He got it traced or something and it turned out that a company that had previously used the guy's phone number had some tank that they had rigged to call them when it was empty. The company wasn't around anymore but they didn't shut off the tank, so as Dave Barry put it, a guy was being harrassed on his phone with no human interaction at all (ah the wonders of machinery!)

[Kitsa]

I have an update.

My phone rang again this morning....866 number I didn't recognize. It stopped ringing before I got to it, so I picked up and called back.

The lady answered, "National Collections Operative", or something like that. I said someone from that number had just called me. I heard a lot of quiet shuffling sounds, like she was trying to pull up an account from my phone number or something.

She asked, evidently getting ready to go into some sort of spiel, if the number I was using was the number they called. And then I laid into her about Greg, his boat, and being sick of being called constantly.

Then she said something that threw me..."Well, we're the Greg people, but we're not the boat people."

......?

Greg and his boat were inseparable in my experience and their combined powers were a key element of my phone misery. Up to that point, I didn't know that Greg and his boat didn't always go together.

Anyway, I took down her name (Cora), her company's name (NCO), her manager's name (Cecilia) and the date and time. She says she'll take me off the list of numbers. We'll see. I could do with 15 fewer nonsense calls a week.

Is this the end of the Greg and his Boat saga?

[Sam]

OR THE START OF SOMETHING FAR MORE SINISTER?