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"Phone numbers"
05/21/2004 Entry
Obviously there are tons of ways in which one can study memory and recall from the trivial to the immensely important. This morning I was wondering about a tiny corner of this area: how do people remember numbers, and in particular, phone numbers? I wish I had a better reason than the following for bothering with all this. I was woken up, for the nth time, by a phone call from a number that looked much like mine. What gives?
When I answered, the caller hung up. This had gone on for a while. At first I thought I would just ignore it and it would go away. But clearly it didn’t. So I decided to call back the number. The person had no idea what I was talking about (i.e. that someone from that number kept calling me), told me his was a new number (seemingly irrelevant since they were the ones making the call not receiving it) and eventually hung up on me. However, a few minutes later he called back to say that the owner of the number was checking his voicemail and had dialed the wrong number, thus the stray calls. Aha, of course. There are providers that allow you to check your voicemail by calling your own number. Ideally in this case the person would just add a speed dial, but of course that would not help me in cases when they would try to access voicemail from another phone… so I decided to get my number changed. (Other reasons follow below.)
But so why the frequent mistakes? My number looked like this: XAY-BBXA. The number from which I was getting calls was XAY-BBYA. Add to this that X and Y are located in somewhat similar positions on the dial pad (just across from each other) and I guess it is not so crazy that someone would keep getting it wrong. I don’t know much about how we remember numbers, but it seemed such a confusion was within the realm of possibilities (too much so, in fact, as evidenced by the frequently made mistake in this case). I am extremely visual when remembering phone numbers so I just dial them on the pad. In fact, at times even just to remember a number to give it to someone I have to “type it out” on an imaginary pad. I just wish this person would have remembered the right sequence. In any case, the idea that I would have to depend on this person remembering their own number correctly was not appealing so I moved on.
Other reasons I had been annoyed by the number included text messages and phone calls aimed at perhaps the previous user of the number. Her friends had a hard time understanding I was not her and just kept calling.. and sending text messages. This is especially annoying since the receiving end (here: me) pays for such call minutes and text messages (the latter do not even require any action on your part so you cannot just ignore them, the charge is automatic). Add to that the tone of some of those text messages, and I was far from amused.
Lesson learned: when getting a new number, ask for one that is new or has not been in use for a while.
Replies: 2 Comments have been posted, click here to see them and add your own
Ha. I'm always getting calls for NU's HR department. I sometime imagine all the chaos I could cause if I was a bit less scrupulous.
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