Wrong Numbers

Sunday night was auditions for The Hobbit!!!

:D

I'm rather excited... it felt extremely gratifying to be in the audition room on the acting side of things again... Also, I think it went alright. I found out that a half-ocelot Gollum actually works out rather well... ;)

One of the rather entertaining aspects of these auditions was getting to sit out in the hallway & watch my fellow auditionees react when they were told: "Here, you'll read these sides, do some movement, and then tell a joke." To a person, each of them reacted with some variation of surprise & dismay--tempered with relief when they saw that jokes had been provided for them if they happened to not have any in their repertoire...

I had jokes... mwahaha... I ended up using a string of knock-knock jokes (no bananas entered into the conversation...), but there were several I carefully considered before choosing that particular series... Maybe I'll tell them to ya sometime ;D

Today at the pillow-place was kind of entertaining. It was slower than yesterday (thankfully!!!), so my fellow phone-answerers & I had time to swap stories a bit. One of the more hilarious parts of our day tends to be the wrong numbers...

That's right, for once the title of this post might actually have something to do with a smidge of the content!! Is that allowed? I dunno, but we'll find out...

Anyhoo, wrong numbers. Today I answered the phone with a cheery "Hello! Thank you for calling (company name), this is (my name)--how may I help you?" The wizened old lady (in my imagination at least) launched right into her tirade with a "I've been buying your vinegar for seven years now, I'm in Arizona and have been sending you checks for your vinegar--" and so forth.

Did I mention we sell pillows? I have no idea how this lady managed to buy vinegar from us, that's a rather neat trick...

I politely told her of my suspicions that she might have the wrong number, only to met with a "what?" So I repeated myself, and was met with deafening silence, and a small click. Sounds like someone was embarrassed...

Another call today was from a gentleman in Michigan, he was trying to locate the Forest somethingorother--it sounded very martial & foresty, which made for a strange combination. However, we were both rather confused, because his first question was not "who is this?" it was "where are you located?" Not the usual first question of a caller, I admit (that's usually "how much do they cost???"), but not irregular. So I told him we were in Minnesota, and he sounded confused, but began telling me about his attempt to locate a "local branch"... which made me confused. So I asked him what his question seemed to be & he told me he was having some trouble with his fireworks.

I mean, really? I wanted to keep him on the line & find out what kind of problems, but fireworks being what they are I thought the safest course of action would be to get him the help he needed as soon as possible! I informed him of my hunch, told him what we sold, and had a good hearty laugh with him before he hung up.

I wish I could help him with fireworks.

For a while at work we were having problems with a certain drugstore constantly transferring people to us. It got to the point that we could tell just by looking at the number prefacing the caller id if the caller was going to be a wrong number or not... If they were bright they would hear us answer with the pillow bit & just hang up. Some of the deafer sort would launch into a tirade about their insurance, medication, paychecks, or what have you and we'd have to interrupt them to break the bad news to them. It was kind of surprising once or twice how terribly people took it to heart, and how angry they would get with us for not being the people they were trying to reach! I actually had a woman chew me out for not being the person she was supposed to be transferred to--on the upside, that was when I got an inkling of why all those people were wrong numbers...

I was yelled at once for not being the Department of Defense too... The man was very offended that I had the gall to answer the number listed under the Dept of Defense and not be them--he was not capable of misdialing, you understand. ;)

But anyhoo, I hafta run. Thank the people who answer your phone call--whether you meant to call them or not!