2.30am,and the phone rings...

Squiffy

We often used to get early morning calls from foreigners trying to book seats on a, now defunct, airline! Our number was one digit different from that of the airline! I think that there may have been a misprint on their headed paper etc as the calls stopped after a while.

We used to get regular calls from people wanting to book a table😄 tho not in the early hours.

We once had a very drunk phonecall from DS in a nightclub telling his dad what a wonderful father he was and that he had just told his girlfriend he hoped to be as good when he became a father himself . Sadly he denied all knowledge of this in the morning

Greciangirl

Why take a mobile phone to bed with you if you don’t need it for alarm.
Never take mine or iPad to bed.

Unfortunately, I do have a landline , but never get early morning calls.

I take mine up as my daughter, a single parent, has two children, I don’t have a land line.

We used to have a landline number that was very similar to a local taxi company and I would often get calls trying to book a taxi by people who were worse for wear and there was no telling them they had a wrong number, it was before digital display and number blocking.

DD phoned in the early hours. She was in Canada at the time travelling to a new job as a ski instructor, complete with skis, boots and two large suitcases. She got off the bus at the wrong stop, literally in the middle of nowhere, in the late evening (Canadian time 5 hrs behind UK) with about 10 inches of snow on the ground and no habitation in sight. As we discussed options she told me her credit was down to nearly zero on her mobile. A nice little puzzle for my brain after being roused from deep sleep!

Why take a mobile phone to bed with you if you don’t need it for alarm.
Never take mine or iPad to bed.

Unfortunately, I do have a landline , but never get early morning calls.

Yes, the usual calls from the Careline about either my fil or my DM .
When my Dd was at uni we got a very early morning call from one of her friends saying my dds drink had been spiked in a club . Luckily they knew she wasn’t drunk and took her to a central London hospital. So we had to drive up to london to collect her. Thankfully we’re only an hour from central London at that time of the morning .
We were so grateful that she had good friends who looked after her.
And yes I hate those early calls .

Years ago I was on call overnight for software problems. I had a works telephone which I duly took home and took to bed with me every night. In four years it only rang once and when I answered it, I answered with my name and my job - 1st line software support. There was a short pause then the voice on the other end said “Sorry - I think this is a hardware problem” and promptly rang off.

Oh dear. Many years ago when I worked in the fire service I was on night duty and completed lost track of the time.
I phoned a friend for a chat and her dad answered. When he knew it was me all he said was “Do you know what the b….. time is?”
It was 3 am 🙄
I was never allowed to forget that.

We have a public footpath going past our house, public can walk through our property. Having a sleepless night , my light was on at 4.30am when someone knocked on the door. I ignored it. A few minutes later, my OH said someone was talking very loudly near our car. so he banged on the window and they ran off. We don't know if they up to no good or just bad mannered. It was very unsettling.

We use to get landline calls fairly regularly between midnight and 6am with being one number different than the local hospital. We got to the stage we muted it overnight and any family needing us phones our mobiles anyway. I was surprised how many people phone a hospital overnight.
Also remember being 1 number different than the local takeaway......if hubby answered the phone he would take their order and then of course they never got their meal.

Wouldn't have bothered me as I'm just about getting to sleep at that time. What did bother when on holiday over Christmas (still UK) was my mobile ringing and it came up as my home landline phone. 3 times in succession and no, there was no-one in the house using the phone. My son used his mobile to ring my landline and it rang my mobile phone. Weird and scary.

A colleague with whom I was friendly had a day off; her daughter rang the office completely overwrought (she was a nineteen year old student living in digs) and said she kept having weird calls in the middle of the night, complete silence, or heavy breathing, and she wanted her Mum to help her. This was pre mobiles, and we couldn't contact Mum, so I rang BT, who told me about '1471' which had just been implemented. It was quickly sorted; the caller was an ex girlfriend of the landlord, and she was convinced he was having an affair with one of the students living in his house.

I had a call from an elderly lady who had fallen in the bathroom and was waiting for her daughter to arrive imminently - she called my number by mistake thinking it was her daughter's which was odd as she can't have had her on a shortcut. But it was a genuine call. She reassured me her daughter was already on the way and would be there very very soon, bless her. I asked her where she lived and she said Manchester if I recall correctly, which is about four or five hours from me but wouldn't tell me more.

Squiffy

We often used to get early morning calls from foreigners trying to book seats on a, now defunct, airline! Our number was one digit different from that of the airline! I think that there may have been a misprint on their headed paper etc as the calls stopped after a while.

Not quite the early hours but years ago, my grandparents lived in Norwich but would often get phone calls for the Nottingham police station as it was the same number but the code for Norwich is 01603, while Nottingham is 01602.

I had a call from the police in the early morning hours. As my husband was a long distance lorry driver at the time, I feared the worst. However it proved to be that they were looking for another person with our surname in our town whose phone number was practically the same as ours, just two digits turned around. Their shop had been broken into. Amazing coincidence.

I was woken at 3am by the phone ringing. My DH was on nights. A male said in what I thought was a sinister voice "you have two little girls haven't you" nasty laugh then he hung up. I didn't have two little girls but still felt quite shocked.

We used to get lots of middle- of- the- night calls as the house next door had an alarm and they had put us down as the contact number to ring when the alarm went off. Many times we'd be standing out by the road,coats over nightclothes, waiting for police to come and investigate as they had to be escorted around the house to check for intruders. On one occasion, a P.C came downstairs convulsed with laughter having had to wake up the house owner to tell her that police were in her house. She'd taken a sleeping pill and had slept through the screaming alarm. We never ever got a thank you for being their house guardians.

pen50

When my children were teenagers we lived out in the country, about two miles from the nearest bus stop. They knew that they could ring me any time, day or night, and I would come and get them, no questions or recriminations. I'm a light sleeper so getting going was not too difficult, even at three or four in the morning. I often found I had to deliver one or more of their friends home too; it amazed me that their parents were happy to leave them to dodgy minicabs, potentially drunken lifts, or worse...

Yes. I was the village taxi service, too. I’d be woken up in the early hours by one of my kids needing a lift home and be in the car a few minutes later trying to remember where I was going to. I’d often ferry their friends around, too. I used to rather enjoy our chats in the car. Then a few years later one of my grandsons used to get croup badly when he was a baby and I’d get a call asking me to stay with the older child. I never dared to have a drink back then. I reckoned that I was the one that wanted to live in the country and if it meant having to drive my kids around so they had a social life sobeit.

Yes, the dreaded middle of the night call, don’t get too many, BUT, a few months ago my son currently boomeranging (for the 7th time!) had sought help via 111, positive outcome!, but the person who clearly organises the admin @111 couldnt get a response at 2.30am from son outlining his outcomes, so thought it fit to call his parent!! When I complained about inappropriate time (thinking maybe a call centre in distant lands) she said she was based in Bristol and had to complete her records!!

I also turn my mobile to silent at night, except for calls from my daughter who is a single parent with two young children.

We used to live in a house where the landline number was one digit different from the local Samaritans, and we often had night time calls from desperate and suicidal people. It was very distressing to have to say sorry, you’ve got the wrong number. It was always hard to get back to sleep.

Yes, my daughter saying that my son in law had been in an accident and was being airlifted to a London hospital, and could I come to sit with the children. I was useful in a moment of great need. I do not turn my phone off ever.
Disappointingly, I've never been called by anyone to sing that they love me ... still, never say never..

mousemac

I had a repetitive heavy breather at 2am while my twins were weeks old.
The house phone was next to the room where they slept and at 2am, with new babies, being woken any time was not favourite.
You couldn't leave the old phones off the hook, because after a fixed interval they would scream.
Finally we wrapped the phone in several towels every night and managed to shut it in the kitchen at the end of its string.

No heavy breather here but fed up of people phoning in the early hours …I did the same…only it was a cordless phone…I took it off the receiver wrapped it in clothes and stuffed it in the back of a wardrobe in an adjacent room!
Had a few weeks of peaceful nights then,….but months later I tried to retrieve it and couldn’t find it!!! ( it did turn up eventually) but I’d buried it so deep that night, and it had subsequently run out of ‘charge’… it was lost for months!

I work from home ( tho semi- retired now after a life- threatening illness) but my landline number was on an advertising sign in the window. Pre Covid I used to get a lot of middle of the night calls from drunks passing the window on their way home, thinking it a jolly jape! …I eventually removed the bedroom extension and had peace again for a while … after my illness I had an ‘alert’ pendant and the relevant contact box put in my bedroom. So now when the landline rings downstairs it rings through the box but I have no way of answering the phone which is almost worse cos your imagination works overtime wondering who or what the call was…….usually Spam callers despite being on the ‘no spam calls’ register . The good news is that due to Covid a lot of the nearby pubs closed so fewer drunks passing by! I take my mobile and iPad to bed with me and if an emergency then family and friends would call on that…so far, touch wood, no early hours calls yet!
The funny thing was when I was ill and hospitalised, the hospital tried to call my next of kin ( as I was taken in suddenly with no contact info) and they called my ex husbands wife in the middle of the night asking if she were my daughter or sister? So she had to phone my son ..who had been out on his birthday binge and in no fit state to receive a call! Tho fair dos he got on a train and was down here the next day!