Wednesday 17 October 2007

Crossed Lines and Strange Conversations

Have you ever had a crossed line on your telephone?
All day we had numerous wrong number phone calls but no calls for ourselves
When I phoned my daughter at the end of the day she told me that she had tried to call me but had not been able to get through and that when I phoned her, a different number was coming up on her phone display
Realising that there was something wrong Alan called the telephone company
We had seen the engineers working on the telephone system early that morning and it seems that they must have made some wrong connections
As they were not able to come and sort the problem for 3 days we continued to receive constant calls. In the end Alan started to ask people the number they were calling and they were all calling the same number, the number that my telephone was registering.
Alan suggested to these callers that maybe they should use the persons mobile telling them that there was a problem
We subsequently got a call from the lady for whom all these calls were meant
She was very involved in the Cliff Richard fan club
Cliff Richard is currently performing at Wembley Stadium and this lady was getting tickets for people (for overseas readers Cliff Richard is a singer, a pop icon from the 50's and 60's who still has a huge following.
He is a Christian and very well known in both the Christian and secular scene)
What was interesting to me is that for the last few days Alan has been having long and animated conversations with these callers
Normally when he is on the phone it goes something like this:
Yes
OK
Fine
Do you want to speak to Barbara
Do you want to speak to your Mum
and here he was chatting away to these unknown
Cliff Richard fans. Words fail me.
So if you want to chat to Alan on the phone, pretend that you are a Cliff Richards fan with a wrong number. You may be surprised.
Oop's I forgot to mention - we even has a call from a Newspaper telling us that Cliff's Mother had just died - we even got to know before the fans!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello Barbara! Thanks so much for visiting my blog. I absolutely love your photos. Please, please may I put some of them on my blog sidebar? I'll give you credit of course as the photographer. They are the best I've seen in a while.

My parents and in laws, and ancestors came from London and south of there. Two of our boys lived there for a couple of years each. Although we now live in the US, there is still much that I miss about England.

Sara at Come Away With Me said...

That is a very humorous post! Isn't it interesting what life throws our way sometimes. So . . . is this lady going to give you a couple of Cliff Richards tickets for all your trouble? But maybe just hearing all the strange, long, animated conversations was reward enough.

Merisi said...

Barbara, you forgot to give us your husband's phone number! :-)))

Cliff Richards, oh yes, I know him, from when I was still a little girl. Amazing that he still has a following. Well, good for him! :-)

Betty said...

Barbara,
Truth is stranger than fiction, isn't it?

Perhaps Alan should go into public relations....