If you want to buy a Wii, don’t call us
A few days ago I got a call from someone saying that they’d seen our ad for a Wii for sale on Craig’s List. I told him they must have gotten the number wrong, and would he please email the seller about the mistake, because otherwise I was afraid we’d get lots of calls. He said he might be able to do that. I also told him it was really weird that this happened the day after we actually bought a new Wii ourselves. Then I sent this email to my brother:
Subject: Weird
I just got a call from somebody who said they saw a Wii advertised on
Craig’s list for $230 — with MY phone number. ???But weirder still, my caller ID said “[K___ G___]” and I thought that
might be the name of a friend of yours. Or is that purely my imagination?-Zina
Just a minute later, I got another call on the Craig’s List ad. I repeated my request that they email the seller, but they said there was only a phone number and no other contact information. (I haven’t used Craig’s list much, so I wasn’t sure of all the details of how it works.) I called Dean and told him about all the erroneous calls we were getting and asked him how to change our answering machine message. He couldn’t remember how, but eventually I figured it out, and left this message on my phone:
Hi. If you’re calling about the Wii for sale on Craig’s list, that’s a wrong number; there is no Wii for sale at this phone number. If you know us and you want to talk to us, please leave a message.
I let the machine pick up a couple more calls about the Wii. Then my brother Spencer stopped by, and he heard my cell phone ringing in my purse, but I didn’t get to it in time to answer it. I looked in my recent calls to get the number and call it back (in case someone I knew was trying to reach me because my land line was busy.) The caller asked, “I’m calling about a Wii for sale.” I thought “One wrong number is one thing, but there’s no way someone could accidentally have BOTH of my numbers” — and told the caller I’d just (finally!) realized I was being April Fooled. (I think he was a little disappointed since he’d planned to dicker on price and inquire about whether I would charge tax, etc.)
Apparently my brother-in-law Peter and sister Mary came up with this one and got Spen to help out; Spen texted all his friends in his address book. Mary wasn’t planning to give out my cell number (which was smart since that was in fact the giveaway;) instead her plan was to call me and say, “I’m looking for a Wii for Peter and I saw one on Craig’s List and recognized your phone number. And by the way, have you looked at the calendar today, and do you know what day it is?”
The dumbest part is that I DID know what day it was and had even been thinking, earlier, that it was too bad I was sick and didn’t have any great ideas to trick anyone. I was actually kind of pleased to be included in the day’s festivities in spite of my own lack of imagination.
Spencer’s friend’s name is K____ G____, by the way. This was Spen’s email reply to me (after it was all over):
Yeah, it’s just your imagination.
Mary and Peter also got lots of people to leave messages on my other sister and brother-in-law’s phone about a free labradoodle on Craig’s List. The victims happened to be both listening to the messages together, so after a very brief flash of anger at each other for putting the family dog up for adoption, they were able to establish that neither of them had done it, so it must be a prank. (Apparently some of the later messages in the queue were pretty over-the-top, anyway, so they’d have figured it out by the end of the recording.)
