"Hello? Vern?"

Back in '86, I moved into a new apartment and got a new phone number. A friend of mine moved in with me a couple of weeks later, which worked out pretty well. He was working nights and going to school; I was going to school and working evenings, so we hardly saw each other. Luckily, I had an answering machine so people could leave messages when neither of us was there.

It wasn't long after we moved in that it started. One day, I came home and there was a msg on the machine: "Hello? Vern? This is ______. Gimme a call sometime."

OK, wrong number. Happens all the time. No harm, no foul.

A couple of weeks later, same thing, but a different person. No biggie. Vern just hasn't gotten his new number out to everyone yet.

After a couple of months of this, it got to be a little annoying. Vern's getting way too far behind the Power Curve. Finally, I happened to be home one day when a call came in. I grabbed the phone and said "Listen -- no offense, but who the heck is this Vern guy?" The guy on the other end laughed and explained that Vern _____ was a handyman who had done some work for him a couple of years ago and he had need of his services again.

While we were talking, I opened up the phone book and sure enough, there was a Vern _____ listed as living down in Los Lunas. I gave the guy the number out of the phone book and that was that. A little while later, I called the number and talked to Vern in person. We had a good laugh about it and I asked if he wanted me to pass on his new number to future callers. He said that'd be nice.

That was sometime in late '86.

A couple of months before we moved out of that apartment in September 1990, the phone rang. "Hello? Vern?" Unbelievable.

To this day, every once in a while when Terry or I will call each other, we'll start out with "Hello? Mr. _____?". And it still gets a laugh.

I should call Vern the next time I'm in Albuquerque.


Another good phone story happened when our friend Keith was staying with me before I even moved into that apartment. He had stayed with me for about two weeks when I had been living in another place, then I had moved and he came to stay a couple of more weeks before heading off to Japan for two years. He gave out my number to several people so they could stay in touch with him for that last little while, but no one ever called. It was about a week later that we found out he had been giving out the wrong number! Terry stopped by and in the course of conversation, we discovered the error. Some poor sap somewhere in town was getting a ton of calls for Keith. We suggested that as soon as Keith got done calling everyone to give them the correct number, he should call the incorrect one and say "Hi, this is Keith. Any messages for me?"

Nah, he was too chicken.

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