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As I tried to sort out an issue with my bank via their app I got a phone call. I'd been talking to an AI robot who had just said they'd transfer me to a real person (if there are actually any of those left) and then the phone rang. AI has got pretty good.
The man on the phone said, "Hi, is Tara there?" She wasn't here, but I suppose it's possible you might find her by ringing random numbers until you get to someone who is in the same room as her.
It seemed a bit like a misunderstanding of modern phone usage. It's pretty rare that you ring a mobile phone number and the phone is answered by someone else. Not impossible, but I can't think of any time that it has happened to me. I think I'd assume that I'd got a wrong number rather than Tara had put her phone down and some bloke had decided to answer it.
I had been pulled away from the app chat and I didn't want to have to start again, so I quickly told him he had the wrong number and got back to the app, asap.
The same number immediately rang me again. Who was this guy? Had he sat there thinking, "Oh no, wrong number. I guess if I ring it again it might be the right number this time? Worth a punt." Sure he might have the number written down and then just typed it in again, but if I'd got through to a wrong number and thought there was a possibility that I'd typed it in wrong, I'd look at my recent calls and check it against the number on the paper.
I didn't accept the call, but he left a message for Tara, asking her to call him back. He didn't leave a number, which implies that this wasn't someone who'd been given the wrong info by a woman trying to shake him off after he'd pestered her in a bar. She knew him and had his number.
He might still have pestered her in a bar, of course. That's a pretty good bet, given he was a man. He was certainly pestering me.
I knew his number too, of course, as he'd rung my phone twice. After I'd finished with the possibly real person at the bank, I texted my mystery caller back "Still the wrong number," and resisted the urge to add, "You can't make a wrong number the right one by just wishing really hard."
I hoped the "Still" would do the heavy lifting for me. The "Still" actually meant, "what's wrong with you?"
He didn't text back to apologise. If I hadn't been busy it might have been fun to pretend to be Tara for a bit but without disguising my voice at all. "This is she." I think that's the kind of thing that Tara would say. In a man's voice. Who knows what adventures I might have gone on?
But I later got a message from a publicist that one of the podcast guests I was meant to be interviewing tomorrow is not well and had to pull out. I realised that the publicist was called Tara. The guest had rung my number thinking I was the publicist. To be fair to him he was definitely ill. Luckily he will never find out what an idiot I thought he was. There's no way, right?
