This week a Parisian restaurant (and a popular one, as I discovered to my *joy*) decided to divert all calls from their reservation hot-line to their work mobile number. Except they didn’t. They forwarded them to my mobile number.  At a risk of sounding like a creaky old fart, I remember when my home telephone number was a mere five digits long. It is now twelve and seemingly there are so many gazillions of mobile phones clamped to earholes on the planet, that it is still possible to have a number almost exactly the same as someone else’s in a city over 500 kilometers away.

Whenever my phone rings in with an unknown French number I get twitchy because the conversation will always reach the giddy heights of bonkers quickly. My French sucks but my scholastic laziness aside, the caller is instantly confused because an English person has answered the telephone of their best friend/boss/husband. Plus, I’ve found that out here, callers just launch into conversation until - as they draw breath - I can nip in and explain (in bad french) that they have a wrong number.  They then reply, ‘what?’ 

Perhaps my accent/inability is causing confusion so I repeat that they have mis-dialed.  They will say ’Eric?’ as if Eric is a regular wind-up merchant who enjoys answering the phone pretending to be foreign women.  So again, I say, ‘no, this is a wrong number,’ in my clearest, bestest French. I deliberately don’t raise my voice as - guess what? - this doesn’t actually make something easier to understand.  Pause.  They will then generally huff and put the phone down as if they don’t have time for this sort-of tiresome, Jeremy Beadle-esque pranking, thanks very much.

Now imagine that times twenty in the space of about an hour.

Caller One catches on quickly that I am not going to ‘reserve him a table for two’, is effusively polite and after putting the phone down, promptly calls me back. Three times.  Despite my repeated insistence  that ‘I am not a restaurant’.  I ignore him on the fourth and turn the telly up.   Caller Three assumes I am a foreign waitress and starts trying to ask for her table in English, bless her. By Caller Ten I want to seek out this sodding restaurant and burn it down. However, by Caller Ten, I realise that this could go on for the rest of my natural life and so attempt to extract from him the name of the restaurant he’s calling so that I can contact them and rectify their mistake. Which - as my flatmate kindly pointed out - would end up in the Kaftka-esque nightmare of me being repeatedly diverted to my own telephone. 

Caller Ten tells me huffily that it’s ‘not a restaurant actually – it’s a pizzeria’ (well, excuse me!) I explain he has the wrong number – this is a private number.  The restaurant has gotten their number wrong and their orders are coming through to a private mobile.  Which, incidentally if your Franco-grammar isn’t great, is a trickier concept than you think.  He then presumed I was some kind of remote receptionist go-between and asked if he could be ‘put through to the pizzeria please’.  I told him, whilst furiously picking the plaster off my kitchen wall that I DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE PIZZERIA which further  bewildered the poor git. I heard a baby crying in the background and thought ‘I know how you feel.’  After some terrible Inter-European confusion of Basil Fawlty proportions I rang off and put my phone in a shoebox under my bed. 

God knows if Caller Ten ever got his Waldorf Salad or whatever it was he wanted. But if he ever finds that pizzeria, there’s no doubt he’ll be lodging a formal complaint about the rudeness of the staff.