2.30am,and the phone rings...

My story is that when I still lived in the parental home the landline quite often rang in the early hours. It was my dad’s mistress. Unbelievably I was the only one who heard the phone ring even though I was on the second floor! I used to tell her he was asleep. Strange times. Indeed I wrote about it for one of my OU creative writing submissions.

A few months ago I contacted Google customer service regarding a fault in my weeks old speaker. I completed the form with my personal details and waited to hear back.

It was during a very difficult period when I was spending every day and some nights with a very poorly relative in a nursing home. I went home late one night and collapsed into bed with my mobile beside me. 2am it rang and I jumped awake expecting it to be the nurse calling me back. It was Google customer service in California! I drew her attention to my address and as we were in a different time zone she’d disturbed me at 2am.

Well, the very same thing happened the next night. A bright and breezy young customer service advisor jumped me out of my skin again. I said you’ve phoned a UK number and it’s the middle of the night here. She replied ok m’am you have a nice rest of your day! I was at the end of my tether and shrieked down the phone “the rest of my day? It’s bl***y 2am here, go and use one of your google speakers to learn about time zones !

Not just at night. I was only thinking the other day how good messenger is because my family contact me without phoning. After several things happening in a short space of time many years ago ( my mum going into hospital, daughter had a riding accident etc) I find that when my land line rings I panic and assume something bad has happened.

My mobile is on do not disturb from 10pm to 7am but my daughters and son and one GS are the only accepted calls.

I couldn’t bear to not be on call if something happened to any of my family although I wouldn’t be a lot of help but there’s no way I could not have my mobile on over night Sleep in totally unimportant if someone is in trouble

We got a call about 1.30 am from a very angry lady telling us to stop hammering and banging. We explained we had been fast asleep for several hours. She said she could hear us through the wall. It transpired she was a former neighbour who did not realise we had moved about 2 miles away and taken our old phone number. 😝

Yes on a few occasions always on the landline.
From Canada in the middle of the night from a chap asking for a person with a shortened name. After about the fourth time it happened we realised they were trying to contact the previous owner of the house. They had moved and not informed them or given the new telephone number.
I have had an obscene phone call from someone who thought I was a man when they said what they wanted to do to me.
We have also been contacted by the police to ask for our car's registration number. We had sold the car a few months earlier and it had been used in a Bank Robbery the night they called us.

friends of mine moved to a new area.
keep getting calls in middle of night from distressed/confused people, telling them someone they'd never heard of had died.
and how soon could they come round ?
took a while to realise their new number was one digit different from an undertakers' . . .
when a few years later sadly the husband died, the wife knew who to ring . . .
it helped somehow, having had that shared experience when they first moved in.

Yes, mostly because a daughter has gone into labour or a loved one has been admitted to hospital.

My Mum in her early stages of dementia lost her ability to tell the time and would call at all hours.
No landline in use, mobile is by our bed, mainly as my daughter is a single parent.

My mobile is on silent at night. Never had a landline call at night.

No. My phone is on do not disturb from midnight to 8am, and programmed so that only my sons, daughter-in-laws and husband (in case one of us is away overnight) get through. Thankfully, they’ve never needed to.

I turn my phone to silent overnight, I cannot think of an emergency where I would be the first person to contact.

Oh and by the way, we don’t have a house phone, only mobiles. I’ve set them so we only receive calls from family or close friends now, saves the nuisance calls.

Oh yes had many night calls. Same as above son in Australia lost his wallet, we frantically trying to find a way to send him money.
Many calls from parents when they’d pressed their alarms by mistake or they were ill. Calls for lifts from teenagers, they always knew we’d help.
I do hate them though. It’s the most awful feeling. Take it easy today and have a good sleep tonight.

Oh yes.
May have written before about son ringing to say someone in his block and he thought the woman may have been being domestically abused and should he ring the police? Yes. I told him not to tell them it was him who rang.

And yes. A family member rang to tell me someone had gone into a&e and she needed a hand hold.

My DD went to Australia on a working holiday, this was several years ago now. Not long after she'd arrived and was job hunting, I got a phone call at 2am with her in a panic because she'd lost her purse with her bank cards and cash - she was in an internet cafe and had left it on the desk while she went to ask staff to sort out a problem on her computer. I was up for most of the rest of the night, reporting her bank card stolen and finding out how to send her emergency cash. It didn't help that she was living in a backpackers hostel at the time.

Other early-hours calls have been to tell us that MIL had been blue-lighted to hospital with a heart attack and that my own mum had triggered her Lifeline alarm because of a fall. My heart always sinks when the phone rings after midnight.

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.

A few years ago my son was called in the early hours by a man who sounded very odd....initially my son presumed he was drunk and it was just a wrong number.
Over the space of a week, it occurred quite a few times and it was clear something was very wrong.
Using the area code (it was a landline number) my son contacted the police in that area and asked if they could help with a welfare check - he got a call back from them.
The man was suffering from Dementia and living alone, things weren't good.
Hopefully the call helped in some way.

Yes. A man to whom I sold a car years ago started phoning in the wee small hours but saying nothing. Weird. My husband called him and it stopped. Nothing wrong with the car btw.