posted on Thursday, June 08, 2006 4:48 AM
by
Endie
Strangeness
This is the latest in an increasingly odd series of coincidences. I got back from holiday yesterday and dumped my rucksack in the hall. Almost immediately, the phone rings, and when I answer it I am asked if the caller can speak to a person we shall call Ms X. I knew Ms X very well indeed some years ago, but apart from a chance meeting a few weeks ago, I haven't spoken to her in half a decade, which says something about the state of our friendship.
So imagine my confusion at this call:
"Keith speaking"
"Hello, can I speak to Ms X?"
"Erm... who, sorry?"
"Ms X. This is Ms Y at St George's."
"Uhm, I'm afraid she's not, uhm... Sorry, who gave you this number?"
"She did."
"When?" [internal monologue: 1999?!?]
"Yesterday."
"She gave you this number yesterday, to speak to her?" I must admit that I looked around the room, somewhat suspiciously, at this point. I suspected some sort of terribly subtle setup. At the very least, it implied some radical alterations to my living arrangements.
"Yes."
"This number, yesterday, to speak to her?" I don't think I was coming across as terribly intelligent, and the lady at the far end - a nice sounding girl in her twenties, I would say - was beginning to use her terribly patient teacher's voice. But in my defence, how often have you had a phone call asking for a friend who has never even lived at your address, asking to speak to them, five years on, with the caller claiming they were told your number yesterday?!?
"Yes. Is this [Organisation Name Z]? Is she available?" I thought I heard a note of confusion, but she was a trooper, and probably a little intrigued, herself.
I resisted the huge temptation to say "I haven't a clue love, you'd have to ask her." Nothing jars me out of confusion like the chance to make a cheap joke, but who am I to have fun with the careers of others (this was clearly work-related)? I was also tempted to have a little fun: I can socially engineer like any ex-hacker. Instead, I did the responsible, dreary thing and told the utterly bemused caller that I was terribly sorry, and really couldn't help her, having no idea how to contact Ms X. I think I may have suggested that she'd be a bit taken aback at her mistake if she knew.
The solution to this strangeness? Googling the organisation mentioned reveals a one-digit difference in the phone number from my home one. Freud and our recent meeting will have done the rest.
This sort of thing is happening to me all the time at the moment. Several times a month. Coming one after another as they recently have, the compounding effect of oddity upon coincidence rather reminds me of the period when I described to several groups of friends, in some detail, my dreams about muslim terrorists destroying tall, black buildings in the United States with passenger jets. That was in August 2001. (And the rational explanation for that was simple, as well: five billion people in the world means that quite a few are going to spend the month before 9/11 dreaming about watching islamic terrorists in planes take down skyscrapers. Didn't make it feel any less Hunter S Thompson-weird.)
When the phone gets weird, the weird get confused.