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She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

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Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#81

Post by ubermonkey »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #34
hyperman1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be nasty. A friend of me once got a ton of phone calls for a specific realtor. Turns out the realtor made a misprint on their business card. The realtor didn't want to do the expense to print new business cards, so they were just going to give this card to everybody. Could he just forward everybody to them, and maybe fill in their customers on some basic information like opening hours and holidays etc. This…

I read/heard a similar story of a hotel getting a number that was a digit off from some old woman who'd had it for years. After they refused to change it, she started taking reservations, and booking wedding parties and the like, if the person on the other end didn't believe her when she said they got a wrong number. The hotel did eventually capitulate.

That same thing happened to my friend M in college. Back then - '89 - our school was probably not unusual in having a campus phone number scheme that was super predictable. The phone number in room X of building Y was 348-xxx1, say, and the next room on the hall was -xxx2, etc.

So if you knew the building, and you knew which room someone lived in, you knew the number. Campus telecom never changed this up at ALL.

Well, in the summer of '89 they built a new rec center, and it obviously got new numbers. And the number they put at the racquetball court reservation desk was one digit off from M's number.

He got racquetball calls ALL THE TIME, but the ones that annoyed him were very early in the morning. He complained to Telecom, but they wouldn't help, so he did what your little old lady did: he started taking reservations -- and to make it worse, he gave out confirmation numbers.

The rec center didn't have a confirmation number system.

After about a week, the racquetball center got a new phone number. Which is hilarious and shows how stuck campus telecom was in their thinking, bc it would've been way simpler (you'd think, anyway) to give M and new number given how much printed matter had the racquetball number on it by then.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#82

Post by Hamuko »

mehrdadn wrote: post #10
ricardobeat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messages were sent to her number. I don't think there is any privacy violation if you drop mail addressed to 'person residing at this address' at the wrong house.

I mean, when they say Elon, it's no longer exactly addressed to "the person residing at this address", right?

There's no other metadata for text message recipient other than the phone number. You can't see that the sender fucked up before you actually read the text message.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#83

Post by epanchin »

bagacrap wrote: post #73
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

However she got the number, she's got no intention of getting rid of it. Note that she has already provided it to many talent contacts. Plus, it's probably something that she's actually treasuring, at this point. I'll bet that she's quite warm and friendly to anyone that calls, no matter how bizarre. She's trying to break into a very competitive field, and every edge counts. This is a big one. If she has the talent t…

skin care consulting at Sephora is competitive?

Later in the article it states aspiring actress. Ironic that you’ve been condescending and yet lack basic reading skills. I certainly wouldn’t want a skin care consultant that couldn’t read the bottle.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#84

Post by mehrdadn »

Hamuko wrote: post #82
mehrdadn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, when they say Elon, it's no longer exactly addressed to "the person residing at this address", right?

There's no other metadata for text message recipient other than the phone number. You can't see that the sender fucked up before you actually read the text message.

Yes and my point wasn't about reading the message but about sharing it with others. If you think you're the intended recipient because the only information you have is the recipient's number, then that's one thing. If it's talking to Elon Musk in the message then it's clearly not addressed to you, so you don't have the same grounds for sharing it.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#85

Post by languor »

bagacrap wrote: post #73
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

However she got the number, she's got no intention of getting rid of it. Note that she has already provided it to many talent contacts. Plus, it's probably something that she's actually treasuring, at this point. I'll bet that she's quite warm and friendly to anyone that calls, no matter how bizarre. She's trying to break into a very competitive field, and every edge counts. This is a big one. If she has the talent t…

skin care consulting at Sephora is competitive?

actress

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#86

Post by drivers99 »

hyperman1 wrote: post #28
Chris2048 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the messages suggests he still gives out this number.

This can be nasty. A friend of me once got a ton of phone calls for a specific realtor. Turns out the realtor made a misprint on their business card. The realtor didn't want to do the expense to print new business cards, so they were just going to give this card to everybody. Could he just forward everybody to them, and maybe fill in their customers on some basic information like opening hours and holidays etc. This…

When I was in college living with a roommate, a local daycare mistakenly listed our phone number in the Yellow Pages (it was correct in the white pages), so we’d get calls from potential (and existing?) customers. At first we’d tell them “wrong number” but my roommate liked messing with them (the constant calls were a nuisance) and would say they were out of business and other nonsense. The daycare eventually caught on and so the phone company called me and asked if we were telling people they closed (we denied it), and then offered us $200 to let them change our number as compensation. They said it would cover the cost of the calls we’d have to make to tell people about our new phone number, but it felt like a fortune to me as a college kid (more than half our rent).

Point is, giving out the wrong number to people is not good marketing. That would be like letting your domain name expire in today’s world.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#87

Post by [deleted] »

bagacrap wrote: post #73
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

However she got the number, she's got no intention of getting rid of it. Note that she has already provided it to many talent contacts. Plus, it's probably something that she's actually treasuring, at this point. I'll bet that she's quite warm and friendly to anyone that calls, no matter how bizarre. She's trying to break into a very competitive field, and every edge counts. This is a big one. If she has the talent t…

skin care consulting at Sephora is competitive?

[deleted]

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#88

Post by CathedralBorrow »

mberning wrote: post #62

Elon has really kicked the hornets nest. This is the level of petty BS they will publish about somebody they don’t like. Imagine what they turn a blind eye to if they like you.

In what world is this human interest piece an attack on Elon Musk? Is any non-fawning coverage a hit piece?

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#89

Post by usrusr »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #75
billme wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you suggesting? The woman that’s photograph appears in the article, “Lyndsay Tucker, a 25-year-old skin care consultant, who works at a Sephora beauty store in San Jose, Calif.” — is obviously a real person.

i think the suggestion is that musk is picking up the phone in his mrs. doubtfire voice and saying "hello, this is tucker, i'm a real person, who is this mr. musk you speak of?" ... or more likely just for text messages.

Roughly like that, yes. And it really would only work for text messages, not only because of the voice issue but also because a phone call rarely contains actionable information before both sides have informally confirmed identity.

Re: She Gets Calls and Texts Meant for Elon Musk. Some Are Pretty Weird

#90

Post by Scoundreller »

elliekelly wrote: post #69
keiferski wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I find this article really distasteful. Being a public figure shouldn’t mean you have zero privacy.

It actually surprised me that Musk (or any public figure) would give up an old phone number. I would have expected a personal assistant to monitor the old number for a time until the calls/messages stopped.

Same. I’m planning on retiring an old DID for my mom.

Plan is 6 months of “this phone number is retiring, please update to _______, update your records. we’ll connect you now.”

Then 6 months of “this number is retired, hang up and call _____”.

Then 3 months of dead-end (but will review CDRs).

When I cancel it, I plan on calling any new owner to ask them to forward any calls for her to us.

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