Sally Breslin: My Life: WRONG-NUMBER PHONE CALLS CAN BE A REAL HOOT!

A lot of people nowadays say they prefer to e-mail or text their friends and relatives rather than call them because it’s more convenient, but personally, I don’t think anything ever will take the place of the good old-fashioned telephone.

This might sound crazy, but I think wrong numbers are what I would miss the most if I didn’t have a phone, because “goofed-up” calls can be pretty entertaining.

For example, my phone number is only one digit off from the number of a local bakery. Early one morning the phone rang and I, still half asleep, picked it up to hear, “What kind of buns do you have, and are they fresh daily?” I hung up, thinking it was an obscene phone call.

And just the other day, I received a real doozy of a wrong-number call. It came in the form of a lengthy voice mail.

The caller identified himself as an attorney and said he was looking for my husband. He went on to explain that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So (whose names weren’t even vaguely familiar to me) were getting a divorce and he was representing the woman. He fully described the details of the divorce, and then said he needed my husband to be a witness because he owned the company where the male (in the divorce) most recently had been employed.

Well, the only business my husband ever owned involved a pitcher of lemonade and some paper cups when he was about six, so I knew right away that the guy had the wrong number. Not only that, my husband passed away back in 2012.

Entertained, I continued to listen.

By the end of the message, the attorney was beginning to sound pretty demanding. “If your husband doesn’t call me back and freely provide the information I need,” he said, “I will subpoena him! But if he cooperates, I promise that everything he says will be kept strictly confidential.”

I had to laugh. A man who had just spilled his guts about all of the private details of a divorce case, his every word recorded for posterity, was promising confidentiality? Heck, I could have gone to court and taken his place in the case, I knew so many of the details by then.

Even though I thought it would be fun to have him subpoena my dead husband, I called the attorney and left a message, telling him I’d never heard of the people who were divorcing; that my deceased husband never had owned a business; and finally, that it might be wise of him not to go around blabbing confidential case histories until he was certain he had the right number.

Sometimes phone-call miscommunication, rather than wrong numbers, also can have some pretty humorous results. Take, for example, a call I once made (before anyone had home computers and could look up information on the Internet) regarding a Christmas gift I wanted to buy my husband for his model-train collection. I’d received a catalog in the mail that advertised miniature U-Haul trucks that were the perfect size for model-train cities and towns. Each state had its own truck, which featured artwork depicting something specifically pertaining to that state. The problem was, the catalog didn’t show any photos of these trucks or even describe which pictures were on them...other than New York.

Well, I knew that New Hampshire's U-Haul had a quaint Colonial church and village on it because I'd seen so many of them around, and that it probably would be the first one on my husband’s list, so I decided to order that one for his collection. But then I started to wonder whether any of the other states’ trucks, like Montana or North Dakota, might have a picture of a buffalo on it. My husband had been collecting buffalo/bison items for over 25 years, so I figured if I could get him a 1:87-scale U-Haul with a buffalo pictured on it, it would be like giving him two gifts in one (one for his train collection and one for his buffalo collection).

I called the company that was offering the miniature U-Hauls, but was able to speak only to someone who was manning the phones and didn’t really know much about the products. So I called the nearest U-Haul center in my area.

“I have a dumb question,” I said to the guy who answered. “Does any state have a picture of a buffalo on its U-Haul truck?”

There was silence for a moment. “I think it might be Wyoming,” he finally said. “Or the Dakota that doesn’t have Mount Rushmore in it, because I know that either North Dakota or South Dakota has Rushmore on its truck.” He then told me to hang on while he checked with someone else.

He returned a few minutes later and said that nobody really knew anything about a buffalo, then suggested I call U-Haul’s national 1-800 number. He added, “But please DON’T tell them I told you to call!”

I called the toll-free number and was transferred to the director of art design (or some such title). Unfortunately, the man spoke very little English. Three times, I had to repeat that I wanted to know which U-Haul truck, if any, had a buffalo pictured on it.

The man told me to hold on, then covered the phone. Faintly, I could hear him saying in very broken English to another employee, “This woman wants to rent a truck that’s big enough to carry a buffalo. Will it need special air holes or anything?”

By the time the second man came on the line, I was giggling so hard, I barely could talk. I finally explained to him exactly what it was that I wanted.

“Oh,” he said, laughing. “It’s Wyoming that has the buffalo on its truck. But only on the newer ones. The older Wyoming trucks still have a cowboy with a lasso.”

The problem was, I had no earthly idea whether the U-Haul trucks in the catalog I received were the old models or the new. So I finally decided to order only the NH truck, just to be safe. After all, my husband really wasn’t into collecting cowboy memorabilia...unless the cowboy was lassoing a buffalo.

But the funniest phone miscommunication I can remember occurred back in 1969, when I was working as a switchboard operator in a large department store. A caller inquired about the name of the manager of one of the departments.

“Ola Haskell,” I replied.

She honestly thought I’d said, “Old Asshole.”

Even after all these years, I still crack up laughing whenever I think about it.

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