Three Wrong Numbers

I have had three wrong numbers of note in my life. They span more than thirty years. The first was sometime during the summer months of 1994, the second was about nine years later, and the third was last Thursday. Each one is a singular mystery, an enigma, an odd-enough-to-remember event. It was this third call, during a friendly conversation with the caller, who innocently asked me if this was the strangest wrong number I had ever… right then this story bug bit me in the receiver.

The Business Card.

During the “heydays” of the formation and early operation of the Ohio Critical Incident Response Service (CIRS) I was working in my office at the state FOP building when the receptionist routed a call to me. The caller was a detective from a police department in (or near) the Orlando Florida area. I can not now remember exactly which department or his name. 

Anyway, after exchanging pleasantries I grabbed a pen and paper, ready to copy the pertinent information I was sure he was about to give me. Although we had, by then, responded to a few incidents outside of Ohio, we had not done any work that far away. Early on, we had distinguished our unit by responding to some awful events both in Ohio and a few times in neighboring states. Although I was surprised by the call from Florida, I was not shocked because we were working closely with the international organization of the same name and because we were one of the first and largest state-level police organizations to do this work.

This call was not that.

The detective explained that the previous night a homeless man had been arrested because he would not cooperate with the responding officers who had been sent to move him from the storefront he was trying to sleep at, to the nearby homeless shelter where he could get a meal and a cot. 

He fought with the officers and screamed at them, frantically waving a business card in his hand. My card. The detective went on, saying that the man was adamant that if they would just call Mr. Choate (me) I would explain everything to them. They took my card from him and he went to jail. 

A report was generated that normally would not go anywhere except the booking desk but because of my business card and its purported magical ability to explain everything, the report got sent to a detective to investigate. Investigate equals call the guy whose name is on the card.

After asking the detective a second time to tell me this story, I could not explain who, what, when, where, why, or most importantly how my card was in this homeless guy’s possession 1,306 miles away. The detective told me his name, described him to me, and sent me the booking photo, and I responded with the lamest, most basic, stupid, bad-guy-got-caught excuse known to exist in the police world. “Detective, I have no idea what this is about.”

I went on for a bit, explaining who I was, what we did, where we did it, how long I had been doing it, and everything we could think of to try to explain this situation. We brainstormed about my most recent trips to Florida, none of which were in or around the Orlando area. We even considered that I might have left the card in the pocket of a donated item of clothing. The result was, that we had no earthly idea how this had happened. 

We both left the conversation with an interesting yet unsolved mystery. I guess the homeless guy got the card back because two or three times over the next few months the receptionist would tell me that she had received collect calls from the greater Orlando area from this guy. We got the occasional crazy call back then.

(I am sorry I can not remember his name)

Looking back now, I wish I had investigated this further. In my defense, I was kinda busy.

The Thunderstorm

One summer morning, about nine years later, I was driving from my home in Akron to our office in Columbus for a meeting. It was drizzling on me as I left. It was raining, windshield wipers on medium, hard when I got to Mansfield. As I came to a complete, stopped-in-a-traffic jam, just inside the Columbus city limits it was not so much raining as it was auditioning to be an inland hurricane. Sitting still, lights on, wipers going full tilt, I could see a long way ahead of me. Four lanes in my direction all, dead-stopped. Wind howling, sheets of rain slamming into all of us, dark as night, cars rocking as this crazy thunderstorm blew through. Thunder and lightning were seemingly about six feet over my head.

My phone rang.

I knew I was running a little late due to all of this but I was still surprised, thinking Brockboss was calling wanting to know why I wasn’t there yet.

All I got out was “hello”. A woman’s voice crying, nearly panicked, on the line. “We are trapped in this elevator! Please come get us out, please hurry!”  I gotta tell you, I could have made fifty guesses of who was calling but I never would have made it to, come rescue us from this trapped elevator. 

After a couple of minutes of calming her down (or trying to, because every time a thunderclap happened she was crying again, or when the greater downtown Columbus tornado siren started that she could hear she would cry again], I was able to get her to tell me that she and four other people were in an elevator in the Statehouse building. The power had gone out about two minutes earlier stopping the elevator between floors, and “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU AREN’T WITH THE FIRE DEPARTMENT?” The bad news being that not only was I NOT the fire department, not only had she somehow been connected to my car phone, from an emergency telephone in an elevator without dialing features, not only was I about fifteen miles away, but worst of all, she was going to have to hang up, after reaching someone, “yes hang up so I can send you help.”

The thing that calmed her down the most was the gobsmacked realization that her “pick up in case of emergency” elevator receiver had somehow, through atmospheric lightning-induced sorcery connected her to my cell phone. To be honest, I was as surprised as she was. We even had a little laugh about it before I got her to hang up the phone. I gave her my name and my information. She said something funny then, about not being surprised, call the FD, get the PD. 

I called dispatch. They said they would send a truck to get them out. I  never heard from her after that, and I didn’t hear any news report about it, so I guess they all made it out. You’re welcome.

The Other Chuck Choate

I have a VPN for my computer. I have Malware Bites for the internet. I have “Lookout” software on my phone. Also, my cell phone is set up so that if your cell phone number is not in my contact list, when you call it will not ring but instead send you directly to voice mail.

All of this helps me manage the crazies, the scammers, and the curious because almost all of my contact information is “out there” on my web page and also listed in my book and on the “about the author” page on Amazon. This all works quite well and I seldom get an email. text, or phone calls from the crazy bus.

Thursday afternoon I noticed that I had a voicemail message. That rarely happens. (No one I know leaves a message, they just hang up). 

I am gonna nom de plume the caller as Dr. Kelly because first, I did not secure permission to use his real name for this story, and second, because he is kind of the author-behind-the-writer in this case. I will explain that soon.

I listened to his voicemail four times. The long and short of it was:

Dr. Kelly is a professor emeritus at The University of North Dakota. He was at home when a young lady knocked on his door offering to sell him a series of math and science courses for K through 12. She knew of him because of me. She mentioned my name. She had a page with both a picture of me and a brief bio of when I taught at UND. He was comfortable with this introduction as he had heard my name around campus.

Pause… I am not now, nor have I ever been teaching at UND. I have never even been to either of the Dakotas, in my life.

Continuing… She had been an exchange student from Croatia who had lived one summer with me and the family and was now selling this coursework to help her pay for grad school (or some such) story.

His voicemail went on to say that he did not like the course material although it was well put together and he was not interested BUT he did in fact owe me money, a story he made up to help her out since she knew me, as a kind of pay-it-forward.  All good and away she went.

Having no contact information for me he did the next best thing. He Googled me. Having a web page and a fairly recent book on Amazon I was the first Chuck Choate listed therefore, ipso facto and bingo bango he had my phone number.

As I said, I played this voicemail four times, recalling the Nigerian Prince who wanted to give me three million dollars, the Jamaican businessman who needed to shelter a few million dollars in America, the fake bank draft check I got for three thousand dollars, and the recent notification from “FedEx” that my “package” was ready for delivery, all I had to do was pay the shipping.

I sat on all of this from Thursday to Tuesday. It just would not leave me alone. (We have discussed my monkey brain at length in my short story “The Mystery of Mrs. Ker-thump”) so there is no need to go over that again thank you.

Then, I did the same thing. I Googled him. Yes sir, there was his photo and information from the university, his work information, his cell, all matching his voicemail message.

I called his cell on Tuesday. He must have the same setup I have because straight to voicemail I went. “Hi, Dr. Kelly I’m Chuck Choate returning your call.”

Today, Wednesday we connected. As he is retelling the story my monkey brain starts screaming at me… “Hey dummy, remember that time you set up a group on FaceBook of the four Chuck Choates  and how it confused all of their friends and family?” 

I stopped him in mid-sentence laughing, explaining that as strange as my name is, there are at least two of us listed on Google and Amazon. “You are telling me that there is more than one Chuck Choate?” “Yes sir, and he looks a little like me.” “You have an actual doppelgänger?” “No sir, he is  smarter, younger, and makes a bunch of money as some kind of salesman, but yes, we are both Chuck Choate.”

Dr. Kelly and I enjoyed the remainder of our conversation laughing about the situation, that both Chuck Choates have a book on Amazon, and discussing the difference between North Dakota winter and Ohio winter.

That’s when it happened. 

In all fairness, Dr. Kelly does not know about my stupid monkey brain and how it torments me. So when he innocently said, “Is this the strangest telephone call you have ever had?”  I hope he didn’t hear me stammer, stutter, and mumble to myself. I hope he could not hear monkey brain SCREAMING between my ears like two Marshall electric guitar amplifiers facing each other on max volume howling about three wrong numbers. He couldn’t hear that, could he?  

The upside. I met a lovely professor from a place I have never been. We had a wonderful conversation. We shared an unusual situation that I hope works out for him and the “other” Chuck Choate. Dr. Kelly, therefore, gets an author emeritus shout-out for poking the monkey brain with his question.

I got monkey brain to quiet down now that I have written this and did it without Dr. Kelly believing that I hear voices in my head.

Business cards, lightning bolts, and doppelgängers. No one could make up this crazy life.