Wrong number

For the past couple of weeks, I've been getting random phone calls from people who think my name is Lisa and that I'm putting on a garage sale. Since my name is not Lisa and garage sales are not something I like to organize, I disappointed a few people. I kind of liked it better when they just went to voice mail and I didn't have to talk to them.

Deb in reception (never again to be confused with Deb in Sales because she moved last month to another newspaper) and I even looked through our garage sale section to see if my number had somehow gotten published accidentally. We don't put phone numbers in our garage sale ads, though, and nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. It looked like this would forever be a mystery. And the phone calls seemed to stop on their own.

Until Saturday morning (at 7, I might add). I was already awake, technically, because Eric is insane and was up staining the deck (dude, sleep in once in a while, jeez), but man, I was tired, and also a little disillusioned now that my plans for sleeping until 8 were never going to get off the ground.

I ask for so little, people. Just let me sleep.

Whatevs. When the phone started ringing, I got up, just in case it was an emergency, but I didn't recognize the number so I let it go to voice mail. And headed back to bed.

But I immediately got another call from the same number. Okay, FINE, it's probably important, right? I answered.

The lady on the other end was already talking by the time I got my "hello" out. She was calling me Christie, which was a little confusing, but then she identified herself as Lisa and started in about that damn garage sale, so finally I interrupted to break the news that she had the wrong number.

She was confused and apologetic and quickly hung up, and I figured that was that.

But! Not two seconds* after I hung up with Lisa, Christie called. And was, of course, calling me Lisa. Christie is a talker, though, so after I told her my name is Trisha and I am not, contrary to popular belief, having a garage sale, she wanted to tell me what was going on.

Hey, cool, I like stories, and I was already up anyway, so what the hell.

So apparently there was supposed to be a huge, multi-familly garage sale at the corner of XYZ that very day, but the ad, which has been running for two weeks, didn't appear in the paper that morning and she was wondering what was going on. And I'm like, where are you?, because XYZ was an unfamiliar corner to me, and, working for a newspaper that sells subscriptions, I've heard just about every street name in the county at this point in my career.

Turns out she lives in Eugene. When I told her where I was (um, two hours north), she was actually shocked into silence for a second (seriously, she was a talker). Then I told her how I worked for our newspaper and had gone through our classifieds trying to figure out how my number got published, but not finding anything, and how this was all making so much more sense now, since these phone calls had been going on for a while.

So I got a few you poor things and also a few laments about what she was supposed to do now. Since technology is amazing, I was all, hang on, I have Lisa's  number, let me hook you up.

Lisa's number is NOTHING like my number, by the way, not even close. That part will just have to stay a mystery.

Christie was ever so pleased with me, and then we said our goodbyes. I like it when a puzzle comes together, except I like it even better when the puzzle comes together later in the morning.

So that's how I spent the first 15 minutes of my Saturday. The end.

*Not even an exaggeration.