Sorry, wrong number

Sometimes I miss not having a home phone.

Ever since I left college, I have lived a mobile-only life. This is fine in most respects since I'm hardly ever home, and it's easier to only give out one number. On the other hand, I've come to realize that I'm don't necessarily love the expectation that I'm always accessible. Not to mention that I'm missing out more and more on the beauty that is the misdial wrong number.

Like almost everyone I know, not only do I never misdial people, I quite frankly have no idea what people's phone numbers even are anymore. I just select a name on my contacts list, hit the green button and viola! We are connected. None of this dialing of numbers. It sort of takes the sport out of telecommunications, no?

In the 6th grade, there was a girl in my class whose home phone number was one-digit off from the county mental health hotline. Yes, really. And given that the mentally unstable are perhaps more prone to err in their dialing than most, her family got a lot of very interesting calls at dinnertime.

We got a bunch of wrong numbers at my house when I was growing up. There was a period of about a year when we got a series of calls from an old woman, looking for Pearl. Our phone would ring, some member of the household would answer and be greeted with said old woman shouting "Pearl? Hello? Pearl there?"

I still have no idea who this woman was or what her relationship was to Pearl, but eventually we began to feel a strange affinity to Friend of Pearl. We were less and less abrupt in telling her that she had the wrong number. She became like a regular fixture in our routine. I found it hard to believe that she could keep misdialing the the number the exact same way so many times, but old people are capable of persisting in the same mistaken behavior like no other creatures. My grandmother has alternated in calling me Christine or Judy (the names of my aunt and mother, respectively) for most of my life - most commonly, though, I am called "Judy-Uh, Christine-Uh, Sarah." (I would also answer to "Get over here and clean this up, and don't make me come get you.") Eventually Friend of Pearl stopped calling, and to be honest, we sort of missed her. I think once she even left a message on our answering machine which we seriously considered saving. Just in case Pearl ever called - she would know someone was looking for her.