Phone Booth, Canon Digital Rebel w/Lensbaby

Last fall, I shut off phone service at my old house when we moved to our new house on Capitol Hill. Very soon afterwards, the phone company reassigned my old phone number to someone else.

A couple weeks later, Abbey, our Bernese Mountain dog, got out and was found by our neighbors. Her dog tag had my old home number and my cell phone number on it, and when my nice neighbor called the old home number, the guy who answered the phone rudely told her off for calling "his" phone number. Since she couldn't reach me on my cell phone and couldn't keep a dog, she called the pound. When I called the animal control officer later that night, she very politely informed me how I could retrieve Abbey, and also told me about the phone conversation she'd had with the man with my old phone number...he'd also yelled and sworn at her for calling that number.

As the months passed, I kept hearing reports from friends and others who'd mistakenly called my old number...the man who answered the phone would go crazy and get worked up into a tizzy, demanding to know where they got his number, wanting to know who this "Don" person was, and yelling and swearing at the poor person who accidently dialed him. Now I have to admit, at first I thought this was kind of funny...some hot-headed asshole who just couldn't cope with the fact that someone else used to have his number and that people sometimes called it.

As time went on, though, it became more and more of a problem. A few months ago, someone told me that the man who answered the phone was yelling and screaming, saying that "Don" had stolen his identity, and he was furious. He was blatantly abusive to whoever called, and obviously psychologically unstable. He really believed that I'd stolen his identity and was using it in some malicious way, and he was taking out his anger on whoever made the mistake of dialing the old number.

Last week was the breaking point. A guy who was planning to buy my sailboat mistakenly called the old number. The story he got was that I'd stolen this guy's phone number, identity, and credit card, and was using it to steal money from him. He told the boat-buyer that the boat was probably stolen too, and that he shouldn't do business with me. So now the story had gone from strange to hostile, the guy maliciously maligning my character, and nearly costing me the sale of my boat (I did sell the boat, but had to convince the buyer that the guy with my old number was crazy first).

So I called him. I told him who I was, how I was just a regular person who used to have his number. He responded by getting worked up to the point where he could hardly speak straight, demanding that I'd stolen his identity and his credit card, said he had proof, and screamed at me. I calmly told him that I expected him to stop abusing my friends, stop defaming my character, and simply tell future callers that they had the wrong number. I told him I'd file a lawsuit if he didn't stop. He hung up on me.

I called the phone company to see if they could do anything (offer him a new number? Confirm that I was just the old holder of that number?). They refused.

The next day, I was at my parent's house, and I told my step-dad Jim the story. Jim grabs the phone and dials the guy, putting him on speaker phone. On cue, the guy starts babbling incoherently about impounded dogs, stolen boats, identity thieves, and stolen credit cards. Jim baits him for a few minutes, and then gets off the phone.

Now I have to say that I'm not a vindictive person, but by this point, I'm furious. I'm ready for war. My head is spinning with ideas of how to torture the guy. I make plans to sign him up, with my old number, for time-share pitches, health club memberships, calls from Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. I decide to sign him up for every single drawing I come across. Michael makes plans to list all number of things on Craigslist with the number. I figure I can keep his phone ringing round the clock with tele-marketers, salespeople, and religious fanatics. My concrete hope was that he'd eventually get sick of it and get a new phone number, but I also got some wicked perverted pleasure from imagining what all those calls would do to him.

Before implementing the master plan, though, Michael figures we should give him one last call. He dials the phone...asks for Dawn...

There is a pause...and a clearly flustered man says "you have the wrong number" and hangs up.

So I guess the war is off.