My phone at work is one digit away from that of the local chemist. I have a constant stream of callers, some who are the sweetest, polite elderly gentle folk, who are apologetic and polite, and who just failed to see a 3 as a 5. They sometimes launch into a careful description of how their condition has worstened, and how they have run out of tablets, and I'm politely trying to cut in to save their embarassment. Some of them seem so utterly confused (polite still) that I almost want to call the chemist myself to make sure their medicine does reach them. I have done so with one poor lady, who seemed to be so in much of a state I wasn't sure she'd make another call.

The others are probably on methadone. They tend to swear at me before they put the phone down. Or just put the phone down.

It's the elderly who call in the morning, 9 am on the dot usually. The swearing crew call just after the chemist closes for the night, five past six! I can tell it's likely for the chemist, as it'll be a local number, and work calls are never local!

One place I was in I could have made fortune if I could milk a cow.

It appears it was a similar number to a relief milker agency, and we used to get lots of quite desperate requests!

Our old telephone number was one digit different to a local shoe warehouse, and we averaged at least five calls a month from someone requiring a shipment of shoes.

The calls eventually stopped when the warehouse had a major fire, and the business moved to a new location.

We did have a telephone call about six weeks ago, when an elderly lady phoned three times insisting that the telephone number she was ringing belong to her brother and not us. She either managed to get the right number for her brother, or she gave up, because we haven't heard from her since.

Unless its one of the many telephone calls we have, which are switched to an answer machine, and the caller terminates the call in quick time.

"better equipment"

The other day I was talking to our local heating engineer via our landline and his mobile. We finished the conversation, only for our telephone to ring a short time later,with the engineer's number coming up, and we were able to hear a dual voice conversation faintly 'in the background'.

Apparently his mobile often does this - double dials. He keys in a new number, and his mobile also dials the previous number 'as a silent or in the distance call'.