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 :-)