Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Peanut and I saw a police car with its lights on this morning. As we got closer, I realized it was Hubby and he appeared to be writing a ticket. Peanut was excited to see the lights and asked where the fire truck and ambulance were. He didn’t recognize Hubby and didn’t ask to stop. Whew. Once he was ensconced at daycare, I called Hubby to make sure he was OK. The phone rang several times and was answered by someone definitely not Hubby. I know I dialed his number because it’s programmed into my phone and the number was correctly displayed. The poor guy probably thinks I’m insane.

I paged Hubby, but later realized I entered HIS phone number. I’m also not sure if it’s still his pager number. He lost one pager years ago and I don’t know if he kept the same number. Obviously I don’t page him very often.

We had the same problem over the weekend when I realized Hubby forgot his wallet in his hurry to pick up our friend and rent a moving truck. I called several times and each call either went to another voicemail or was answered by the other man. Hubby later called and spoke to the man, explained the situation, found out his phone number, and put in a work order with our cell company (which rhymes with SmallHell).

Hubby is in court this morning, so I called SmallHell. We have cool VOIP (or whatever they are) phones at work that display all sorts of neat info – directory, calls placed, calls received, calls missed, etc. It also displays how long each call lasts. It took me 2 friggin’ minutes to get through AllHell’s automated crap before putting me on hold to speak to a real person. WTF?

The rep was very helpful and nice. She had a record of Saturday’s service request, but nothing was done with it. She did some techie stuff and discovered Hubby’s phone has been set to forward to this other number when he doesn’t answer. My name is not on the account, so I could not authorize them to turn off the call forwarding (even though I could provide our names and the last 4 of Hubby’s social). Whatever. I explained that Hubby’s in court and won’t be answering his phone, so she sent a text message for him to call her…you know since voice mails go to the other guy. She had a great sense of humor.

She said he probably did an accidental forward, that it happens frequently. I’m not so sure, since Hubby is tech-savvy and I can’t see him accidentally forwarding to a stranger’s number. That’s more likely something I would do. He has used the forwarding service in the past without trouble. It’s possible that Peanut somehow did it, but he’s a genius toddler if he managed to push the correct sequence of buttons to forward to a functioning number. Option 3 is that AllHell somehow effed up our account. This would not be a surprise as it took Hubby 3 weeks to get our “Friends & Family Network” up and running. You’re supposed to enter the contacts in via their website, which gave error messages, even after 2 weeks’ worth of daily phone calls to reps and promises of “it’ll be fixed tomorrow”. A rep finally gave in and manually entered the numbers for him.

I’m amused by the whole thing and wonder if we’ll find out how it happened.

***

Update: Hubby called. He thought the page was someone at work pulling a prank and called dispatch to see if anyone was trying to contact him. I had to explain the text message because his display is cracked and has a huge dead spot. Which I knew about but forgot. I'm not running on all cylinders today.

I'm also having difficulty spelling. I need sleep.

1 comment:

the stefanie formerly known as stefanierj said...

Oh, cell phones are hell. I'm still not entirely sure if they solve as much trouble as they cause, but of course, my blood runs cold when I think of being separated from mine for even a few minutes. Sad.