Cellphone Number Migration

In the long run and, apparently, in the short run, cellphone numbers migrate from phone to phone and from person to person.

A jarring example of this occurred some three or four months after my wife passed in 2011.  While staring at my cellphone late one afternoon, I thought about how I sometimes called my wife at midday just to chat a little.

What would happen, I wondered, if I called her number now that she had been gone for all these months?

I dialed my late wife’s cell number.  After a few rings, a woman answered.  Aghast, I immediately ended the call and pushed the phone away from me.  I spent the next several minutes wishing I had not tried calling.

Now, some eleven years later, I have another strange cellphone number experience to share.

We recently got Desiree a “Montana” (406 area code) cellphone.  Almost as soon as we commissioned the phone, she began receiving calls and messages from our area code.  In addition to providing the phone number from which the calls and text messages originated, the name of the person attached to the number appeared on Desiree’s phone.

“I know that name,” I told Desiree when she showed me information for one of the callers.  “If that’s who I think it is, I sold my grandparent’s house to her.”

Following a third (unanswered) call from the person in question, I texted from Desiree’s phone to tell her the phone number belonged to a new party.  When she immediately responded with an apology, I sent a message back to see if I might confirm who she was.

Within a few minutes, the woman and I found ourselves talking on the phone.  She and her husband did purchase the house from me.  Her husband, now deceased, had called me about the time I started building my new home on the lake and asked me if I wanted the fancy front door from my grandmother’s house.  He had saved it after replacing it with a new, more energy-efficient door.

I happily collected the door.  Furthermore, I planned the layout of my house around it.  The door is now repurposed as the entry to the den from my kitchen.   I mentioned the door and texted a photograph of it as I chatted with the woman on the other end of Desiree’s phone.     

Desiree’s phone number apparently (and not all that long ago) belonged to a gentleman from Townsend, Montana.

Posted is a photograph of the door from my grandparent’s house.

The Pacific Street Door

—Mitchell Hegman