I'm not sure what it is exactly with my work cell phone, but it seems like people are constantly dialing it looking for other people.

In some cases, it just seems like it's an honest mistake. Those don't bother me.

But there's the case of this one lady named Cheryl Davis who keeps giving out my cell phone number to her doctors and dentist who call me to remind me of her appointments. I know where they are now (the wonders of caller ID). I know when she's scheduled to get her teeth cleaned. Hey, maybe next time her doctor's office calls I should ask them for a rectal exam on her behalf.... I won't be using any of these offices any time soon. Wish I could figure out how to block these people from calling my cell phone.

Then there's the collection agencies. Particularly annoying are the ones which only leave a message which tells you to call back a number. This seems to be the favorite (annoying) trick of this Argyle Solutions (or something like that) company (if you ever get a call from 800-527-4955, it's this clueless company). I am convinced they call every number in the country randomly looking for people. And even if you ask them to take you out of their database, sometimes they'll call back a few more times for good measure to really make sure it's the wrong number.

If you think I should change my number, well, my wife's cell phone is no better in terms of misrouted calls and I always fear I'll get the number of some former drug dealer and start getting calls at 2am in the morning asking for a hit. At least these people call during the day when I'm awake.

There's a term in the computer industry called "Clean IPs", or numeric IP addresses that have never been listed in a spam database or otherwise been linked to abuse. It's hard to get one of those it seems and you want one of those if you ever want to run a legitimate mail server. Likewise, it now seems to be difficult to get a "Clean Phone Number" that hasn't been previously abused by someone else. We need a service that does a background check on phone numbers so when you're assigned a phone number, you can check its history and the previous owner so you know if you're going to be in trouble or not....