Sometimes real life is so much weirder than fiction.
A while back, I started receiving calls to my cell phone from a number I didn't recognize. Like any number I don't know, I assume robocall or telemarketer. For some reason, I answered after having seen it a few times on my phone.
"Hello?" I said, expecting the signs of a robocall or call center.
After a pause, a woman's voice said, "Hello?" At that point, I knew it was a real person but one who sounded confused.
I asked who she was calling and when she said her husband, I told her it was a wrong number. She said that she dialed his number and told me the area code (a different state area code). We both found it weird that she would dial his number but get routed to my number.
It happened a day or two later and she was a bit frustrated, but we chuckled about it.
A few days after that, I had a couple of other calls from her number but didn't answer. Then, another time, I did and we visited about the issue. We both have the same cell provider and both live within a twenty mile radius, so pretty close. I didn't have her name and she didn't have mine. Not all her calls to her husband were going to my phone, just some of them.
At that point, she asked for my number to provide to their (our in-common) cell carrier to get the issue fixed.
Jump forward a couple of days. I had a busy work event and received a call on my cell (since I was at the venue for the event and calls are also forwarded from my work phone to my cell when I set it out of office). It was the area code of the woman's husband.
I answered as normal, since any calls to my cell during the event could be one of my exhibitors from out of state and I can't afford to ignore them. Nope. It was the guy who had been helping me arrange a few speakers for the event.
Guess what...
He was the husband that the woman was trying to reach. The guy who I've been working with for months from a local speakers bureau!
Boy, did we laugh about that. They still have to resolve the issue with their cell carrier, but it was a relief for all of us to know who was who in this whole strange misrouting of calls.
You just can't make this stuff up!
Update 2/16/23: It happened again, except this time, I had tried to call the husband this morning on his cell and, when that went to voicemail, I also called his desk phone (from which he had always called me, except the other day) to provide feedback on a speaker and got voicemail there too. Later in the day, the wife's call came through to me and she even laughingly suggested we all go out to dinner (I wouldn't mind meeting her). With her on the line, I asked her to have him call me. A few minutes later, he called me, so her second try did get through to him, but he didn't see my call to his cell this morning. Something is messed up with the cell carrier.