You just unlocked a memory for me, and this happened from about 2008-2010 (not cell related, but it is phone related).

One day we got home and there was a message on the machine from someone asking us to remember to bring something when we visited him. Unfortunately, we had no idea who it was, so we just wrote it off as a wrong number. It happened a few more times after that, and we were getting curious.

I’d moved into the house in 2006 and received that phone number at that time. We often got calls from bill collectors looking for the previous residents, so we generally let everything go to the machine.

One evening we got a call, and I think I recognized that the number was this person’s, so I answered it. I told him he had the wrong number, and he said he’d had that same number for years and read back my number, the one he’d just called. I was like, “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve had this number since 2006.” He tried a few more times, and it was sometimes late in the evening.

At some point I looked up the number he was calling from and found it was a nursing home, and the pieces started to fall into place. My wife and I talked about it a few times, and we decided that if our relative was doing that, we’d want to know. We weren’t upset, but it felt like information the family should have. Who knows who else he might be calling, or getting calls from. So, we decided that when he called again, we’d call the nursing home and let them know it was happening.

But, we never got the chance. He never called again.