Crossed

Apparently my home phone line is crossed with someone else's. I had a couple of people tell me that when they called they got someone else, even though they tried/verified the number several times.

Also, I'm a loser and never get phone calls, yet the last two days my caller ID is stacked with calls all over the place from stange numbers that I suspect are really trying to reach somewhere else.

So tonight I called myself from my cell phone. To my amazement, as I watched my own cell number appear on my caller ID, after only a couple of rings, all of the phones in my house stopped ringing, though the answering machine did NOT pick up. On my cell phone I could hear something on the other end, but not a person, so I'm really not sure what happened there, except to say that my phone call went to crossed-line purgatory.

So I called the ever popular SBC to see if maybe my line was being hijacked or something. They said that wasn't likely, but that they could run a quick test on the line. Sure enough, the test came back indicating there was some kind of crossed line problem. But they might not get out here until Friday to fix it.

Here's the strangest part... even though they could tell remotely that my line had a problem, they could NOT tell with whom I am crossed, so they asked me to answer the phone even if I don't recognize the number and ask the caller what number they were trying to call so that I could report it back to SBC. They said it would make it easier to diagnose the problem.