I got a peculiar msg the other day from a number I didn't recognize.

"Hey dude, Are you good? Do you still live in X?"

Turns out it was an old friend that I hadn't heard from in a few years!

I've gotten two messages in the past month of the form "Hi, is this <my real name>?" from unknown numbers. There's a chance they're real acquaintances, but the likelihood of them just being spam finding my name & number in some online database is too high that I haven't responded. If they were real acquaintances, I guess they would tell me who they are, right? Dunno, feels weird.

Or so you think...

It's fine, he had some money troubles and needed $300 to pay his bills on time.

I guess some of us are old enough that wrong numbers were a thing and it was just polite to let them know. Especially when it sounds legit

Considering how almost every form of social trust has been abused to either spam or scam me, I am old enough to remember that but have also had that politeness completely scrubbed from me.

I wish we still lived in a time when being scammed or spammed wasn't so prevalent, but we don't and I'm not doing anything that might tip off either of those groups that my number is ripe for the picking.

Oh yeah, no judgement implied. It’s just a force of habit for me.

Wrong numbers generally used to be caused by misdialing.

Nobody dials numbers any more.

Generally, you are correct. However I had an interesting experience in the 90's where someone's number was somehow linked to mine. So their friends kept calling, for the first few times I politely said that X wasn't here, they had the wrong number. However I had a call blocker on my line, and after two or three phone calls I'd just add the number to the call blocker.

I also had an answering machine, and eventually, I got a long diatribe from the irate person whose number had been linked to mine who was very upset about the situation. They explained the phone company had accidently linked the numbers somehow. They were very upset because their friends couldn't reach them and because I had been call blocking them.

So, I listened to the message, thought a moment and then added them to my call block list.

Somehow when I was in high school, my ex girlfriend's cellphone number became linked to my cellphone number so that if someone called me while I was already in a call, the new call would be redirected to her. It caused some awkward situations. I have no idea how it happened. I had once set her number as a speed-dial on my phone and also set it as a Verizon "friends & family" number so I could call her for free, so I assume somehow there was a glitch with one of these features. She was a mutual friend with a lot of my friends so people just assumed they had called her by accident, but years later I finally realized something was up when a new friend who didn't know my ex got redirected to her. I googled a lot and found out there was some phone star code you could dial to set or unset a number to be used as a backup number, I finally understood that was the association that must have been set, and I was able to clear the association. I wondered a lot if I had accidentally used the star code in the past to set up the association but I can't imagine having done it by accident, and I didn't know about the feature before.

Consider that she did it?

Seems an odd coincidence for it to be fwd to her number of all people.

Agreed, Call forwarding on busy or no answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding Looks easy to set up and could easily be missed on the phone bill.

Nah, she was confused by the situation and I've always been the sort to keep my phone locked and to myself. She never had my phone unlocked.

Nobody dials their friends numbers anymore.

Calling a business though? A colleague had a problem where their number was 1 digit off from some delivery number (maybe pizza?) and got calls all the time.

Someone else erroneously has their number (different area code) in the google info for another business, same problem and took a while to fix.

Hah, there’s a Seinfeld episode about this, where Kramer is one digit off from a movie showtimes hotline, and he fully plays the role and starts answering everyone’s questions about which movies are showing!

I do.

It's good to have a few numbers memorized. What happens if your phone dies, and you need to call someone? If you don't know any phone numbers, you have an problem.

I dial a few of my contacts by number, just to set them in memory.

People do enter numbers into phones by hand, though.

I meet new people fairly often, and if I just ignored these messages, the chance I'm actually being rude to someone I know in real life is fairly high. Now that I know the pattern I will probably be more circumspect about it.

I admit if I got a variant of the “Andy, will my custom mahogany furniture arrive next week?” text mentioned in the article, part of me would be very tempted to reply with, “Absolutely. On its way!”

(I’d probably just ignore it, though.)

I usually reply to these fake texts with something along the lines of "send newdz". Have yet to get a response back for some reason.

Maybe he or she wanted to keep it real?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3U55usfJK8&t=382s

a good portion of these will show a photo of some hot young woman fairly early in the conversation, and trust the horniness of random dudes to outweigh their suspicion.

I’m a boomer. I don’t reply at all to any message from someone I don’t know. How dare you mock people simply because of their age.