Long-time readers of this diary may recall that back in 2004 – around the same time of year, in fact – I had a rather silly phone call after midnight one night, in which a caller had tried for a curry house, got the wrong number, and when I told him I wasn't a curry house he persisted in trying to order a curry from me anyway.

Last night, well past midnight, I had a wrong-number phone call from a curry house, informing me that a meal I hadn't ordered was ready for delivery. When I said they'd got the wrong number, they insisted that it was definitely the right number because it was on their computer as the number the orderer had called from. I said I hadn't ordered anything, and they said that in that case they were going to have to charge me £20 for a prank phone call. I said I hadn't made a phone call, and they insisted that yes I had.

I tried to get them to tell me what address the delivery was meant for, in the expectation that it would turn out not to be my address, but the guy on the phone said he didn't have access to that information as he was ‘only a call operator’. (Seemed odd; a curry house wouldn't have struck me as the kind of organisation which obviously required a separate department for phone calls with limited access to databases.) Meanwhile, some other guy was clearly audible in the background and sounding quite panicked, saying ‘But I've got this curry! The curry's ready! What do I do with this curry?’

I eventually hung up on them, after getting bored with the endless repetition of ‘we're going to charge you £20’, ‘but I didn't make a call’, ‘yes you did, your number is in our computer’. I told them to send the bill for their £20 to the address the delivery was meant for, and put the phone down.

I presume that it really was a wrong number, and that nobody had actually managed to make a prank call which caller-IDed as me. (Not least because if you'd gone to the effort of being able to do that sort of thing, prank calls to curry houses would be low on your list of applications for it!) So I presume that whatever address they had was not mine; certainly there was no subsequent ring on the doorbell with an unwanted curry (although I did dream a ring of the doorbell at 5am, and actually did go down to check it really was a dream and not a confusing curry-related caller). I imagine no bill will turn up in the next few days either, but if one does then I suppose I'll have to tell them to take me to court and prove I phoned them.

But their persistence amuses me, or at least it amuses me now after it finished irritating me. My last confusing curry-related caller persisted in trying to order a curry from me even after finding out I was a private individual and not a restaurant; this one persisted in trying to tell me about my curry delivery even after I told them I didn't order one. Perhaps the proximity of curry is deleterious to people's ability to comprehend that they've got the wrong number :-)

Misunderstanding what the difficult part of a job is. Specifically, the misapprehension that the hard part of a given job is thinking of a starting point or basic approach to the problem at all, when in fact the hard part is getting all the implementation details to work right given such an approach. People under this misapprehension will cheerfully suggest a variety of starting points, some of which might even be the right one but certainly none will be a good one you hadn't already thought of; they will then be puzzled when you look more rather than less irritated, and mysteriously don't thank them profusely for their vital contribution and spring immediately into action.

In extreme cases of this, the person will provide several basic approaches and (implicitly or explicitly) suggest that you ‘simply’ try all of them and see which one works best, apparently blissfully unaware that they've just attempted to multiply your workload by three or four (or perhaps even succeeded in doing so, if they're your manager).