This may have happened to you before, either with your own phone, or with your parents phone... whatever... and it is that people will occasionally call your number instead of some other number. Not just once, but frequently. A friend of mine had a number that was similar to some bank's number. It was a francophone (that means French-speaking...) bank, so he'd get these calls from french people, wanting to know things about the bank. Now, he doesn't speak, or really understand, french. Often, these people wouldn't understand english very well, so it was difficult for him to explain to these people that he was not, in fact, the bank.

I get things like that with most of my numbers as well... once, when I was living on my own, I got a call from some cab-driver, who had gotten a phone number from some person he had driven home one day. He wanted to go on a date... I managed to finally convince him that I wasn't that person he had driven home, but then he tried to get me to go out with him... I eventually got him to get off the phone. That number also got a lot of calls from the person's family, who obviously hadn't been contacted in a while, because the various family members hadn't talked to them in about a year, and wanted to see how they were doing... I had to tell them that I was not them, and I had no idea where they may be now... maybe they died, I don't know.

Now, those were all more or less calls to the same sort of thing. But what I get with my number now are calls to a variety of things... I had a call from a woman who thought she was calling Bell Canada (that's the major phone company in Ontario). I've had people calling for various other people. Just today, I had two calls in a row from the same woman. When I answered, there was this silent pause. Then the woman asked if this was Somerset West. That is, in fact the street I'm on, so I said yes, wondering what this was. Then she asked me if I could put her through to someone else... I told she she must have the wrong number, she apologized, and hung up. Two seconds later, she phones again, still trying to reach this person. So far, she hasn't called again. I wonder what I'll be called up for next time...

At least she wasn't calling for that french bank...