As my favorite author late Mr Stephen Covey said, a telephone is a time waster. You could be in the middle of something very important. Then the telephone rings and you cannot overcome the urge to pick it up, because it could be something even more important. Most often it is not, but you cannot take chances. Depending on your network, it could be sometimes or often a wrong number. There are polite people who apologize when you inform them it is a wrong number. There are impolite ones who abuse verbally when they hear it is a wrong number. There are less impolite ones who just bang the phone down, without saying anything. The last week I had two episodes of wrong numbers which were different from those described above.
I was discussing a patient's management with another professor, when the phone rang. I picked it up.
"Ward 42?" a woman's voice asked.
"No. It is a wrong number" I said and put the phone down. No sooner than I had put it down, it rang again. This person must have hit the redial button, I thought.
"Ha....lo..." I said in a voice that was in my opinion rougher than my regular voice, so that the caller would not identify it.
"Hello" said the same woman. "Is it ..."
"No" I interrupted. "It is still not ward 42" and put the phone down.
"That was a nice one" said the professor. I grinned. The caller did not hit the redial button again, nor did she dial the number again.
A couple of days later, someone called when I was studying a complex document that had arrived in dispatch.
"Is it ward 21?"
"No, it is not" I said. I should have put the phone down and continued with the study of that document. But the guy on the phone was faster than I.
"If it is not ward 21, then what place is it?" he asked. This irritated me.
"You want ward 21. This is not ward 21. How does it matter what place is it?" I asked. I knew I should have realized he was a little simple or something and not got irritated with him. But anyway I had said it before thinking all that. I bet he kept thinking about that long after I put the phone down. I hope he does not ask that question the next time he gets a wrong number.
