Sorry, Wrong Number

Last night I was helping Roxy with her homework (Did you know fifth graders are learning SQUARE ROOTS?? And DECIMALS?? And PERCENTAGES?? She’s going to need to call Uncle Bob soon if things get any more advanced!!) and half-watching the Cubs (how ‘bout that Glendon Rusch? Yeah, baby!) when my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was my Auntie Pat, which I thought kind of odd, since she really doesn’t ever call me. And that made me a little nervous, thinking maybe something was wrong. But when I answered, she greeted me with, “What are YOU doing at your mother’s at this hour?”

Now, let me give you a little background on my Auntie Pat. I love love LOVE the woman to death, and she totally cracks me up. She is a little Italian fireball who is loud and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. At my cousin’s wedding in July, she told everyone that she was planning on going to Aruba to hang out at Carlos & Charlie’s, hoping some native would kidnap her and make her his sex slave. Then there was the time she tried to get a Coke out of a new vending machine that talked. When she put in her money, the machine said, “Please make your selection now.” My aunt, God bless her, stood there yelling into the machine “I WANT A COKE!!” for a good five to ten minutes before someone walked up and pressed the button for her. So when she asked me last night why I was at my mother’s, I kind of laughed and told her she must have dialed wrong.

She told me she loved me but really didn’t want to talk to me, and that she was SURE she dialed my mother’s number. Now, my mother and I don’t even have the same AREA CODES, so I was kind of like, “Yeah, ok, Auntie Pat, SUUUURE you dialed her number.” She was getting a little upset with me, so she said, “Ok, fine, I’ll just try again.”

Not thirty seconds later, my phone rang again. Guess who? I had Roxy answer, and I could hear Auntie Pat’s distinctive voice coming through the receiver. Roxy was giggling and handed me the phone, and I was now dealing with a very agitated aunt. “I DID DIAL THE RIGHT NUMBER!” she was yelling. “TWO-EIGHT-TWO…” I could almost picture her punching the numbers in the air. But the fact remained that either way, she was reaching MY number, not my mom’s. Auntie Pat insisted that someone must be messing with her phone, and said that she was going to call the operator. I asked her if she wanted me to call my mom and have her call HER back, and she said, “NO. If I can’t get through, I’m going to bed. Forget it!! Goodbye, Dasi, I love you.”

Laughing, I hung up the phone again, and figured I’d call my mom anyway to let her know what had transpired. When I dialed her number, there was one ring, then voice mail clicked on. MY voice mail: “Hi, you have reached Dasi and Roxy…” Unbelieveable. Auntie Pat wasn’t crazy, apparently my MOTHER was. Poor Auntie Pat, who at this moment was calling the operator, was telling the truth – she WAS dialing the right number. Since I obviously couldn’t reach my mom on her home line, I tried her cell (hoping to GOD she didn’t just sing along with the ringtone, as she has been known to do). Alas, she didn’t answer (I could almost hear her humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”). So, I did the next logical thing, I called my brother. Knowing full well that all he would pretty much do is shake his head and chuckle in amusement. (Which he did – even though I couldn’t see the head-shake.) As the two of us were trying to figure out if there was some possible way our mother could have pressed some button to activate call-forwarding, my other line clicked. It was my mother – calling from her cell phone. Following was our conversation:

“Dasi?”
“Yes, mom – let me call you right back. And DON’T turn off your cell phone!”
“Why?”
“Because, mom, I’ll explain when I call you back.” (Sudden thought) “WHY are you calling me back from your cell, anyway?”
“Because you CALLED me on my cell.”
“But is there something WRONG with your home phone?”
“No…. I guess I COULD’VE called from there…”
“Ok, mom? I’ll call you RIGHT BACK. DON’T turn off your cell!”
“Ok….”

I clicked back over to my brother, and relayed the above to him. More head shaking and chuckling. But between the two of us, we figured that it PROBABLY wasn’t her new phone, but that she DEFINITELY must have pressed something she shouldn’t have accidentally. My brother is pretty used to bizarre hijinks (always wanted to use that word “hijinks”) that occur often with myself or my mother, and I know for a fact he sometimes wonders if he is the only sane one in the family (By the way, no you are not, Bob. You are just as crazy as the rest of us – you just hide it better). Anyway, Bob wasn’t all that concerned, and left it to me to figure out.

So I called mom back on her cell, which thankfully she answered. Roxy thought the whole thing was pretty funny too, so she picked up the other extension and was explaining to grandma how WE were getting her calls. Mom was pretty flustered, so we told her to hang up, and try calling her own number. Obviously when she did that, OUR phone rang. When Roxy and I picked up on each extension, my mother was cracking up, and insisting she didn’t do anything to the phone. When I told her about poor Auntie Pat, she was laughing even harder. I told her that I really had no desire to be her answering service, so she had better do something. At which point she told me that this wasn’t funny, and to stop laughing. Of course, that made me laugh more, which made Roxy laugh more, which made HER laugh more. Finally, I told her to try calling the phone company to see if she had accidentally activated call forwarding somehow. So she said she would do that, and would call back. I jokingly told her, “Feel free to use either number.”

Anyway, when she called back, she said apparently she DID accidentally activate it. To do so, you have to press *72 or 72#, then enter the number you want your calls forwarded to. My phone number ENDS in 72, so all we can figure is somehow when she initially dialed my number, nothing registered except for the 72, and then when she redialed my number, voila. (Although I don’t know when or how she managed to press either * or #. Leave it to my mother.) She said even the operator was laughing at her, but was really nice and told her how to cancel it, which she did. So now I told her to please be more careful when dialing.

And as for Auntie Pat, well, I DID call her back to tell her she wasn’t crazy. (At least not as far as the phone is concerned.) But she decided to wait to call my mother until tonight. Hopefully mom will leave the phone alone until then.