So I’m uploading some pictures to my flickr account and I decide to fire up my IM client to check if a friend is on-line to try and give her what will probably be one of the first “virtual rings” she’s had, right?
Then this other friend sees me on-line and asks me to call him on his mobile phone, which I do, but try as I may I can’t get through to him. Apparently his brand new phone is dead, he can’t make or take any calls.
Now the thing is that his girlfriend (who is near the end of her pregnancy) is away in some god-forsaken corner of the country and is expecting his call. She’ll be worried if he doesn’t call her and he definitely doesn’t want to do that to her.
So naturally I volunteer to call her but… She doesn’t know me (probably never even heard of me) and it will probably freak her out a bit if a total stranger rings her up saying that her boyfriend asked to tell her everything is OK, so we decide that I’d better call another friend of ours (whom she knows) and ask her to call the girlfriend explaining what’s up.
(Confused yet?)
So I call the third friend, she calls the girlfriend, but the phone is unavailable and all she can do is leave a message in her voicemail.
A few minutes later the girlfriend calls my friend.
As it turns out, she was on a spot which had no coverage, but as soon as she got the message and checked her voicemail she immediately tried to call her boyfriend and, lo-and-behold, it worked!
Apparently my friend’s phone is just too darn picky about which calls to take!
Now who needs fiction and soap-operas with stuff like this happening in real life? :-)
(Oh and the original friend? Well, she wasn’t on-line. A shame really, she’s just the kind of person who would appreciate the humour if I told her what had just happened.)