Some folks have the misfortune of having to suffer more than others from entitled and annoying people. Someone lives next to the loud neighbor, someone’s local store is run by a jerk and so on. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some folks decide to at least get a little revenge.
A man shared his story of the pettiest of petty revenge after growing tired of people constantly using his phone number for reservations. You can imagine just how often this would happen in the weeks leading up to Valentines days. We reached out to the man who made the post via private message and will update the article when he gets back to us.
Having random people use your phone number is beyond annoying
Image credits: Chris / unsplash (not the actual photo)
But one man decided that enough was enough after getting texts about confirming a Valentines day restaurant reservation
Image credits: Jayson Hinrichsen / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: netpastor
There are some reasons to not just give out your phone number
On the face of it, it’s not that hard to see why people might use a fake number. Unfortunately, these days, unscrupulous companies will sell any bit of data they can get their hands on. That does, of course, also include phone numbers. After all, telemarketers and similar companies will pay to get a list of active phone numbers.
Even worse, your number in the wrong hands can be used for fraudulent purposes. You can be targeted with phishing attempts or, in very extreme cases, reroute your text messages. Of course, more realistically, the main issue with someone else using your number is sheer annoyance, as this story demonstrates.
After all, many services do ask you to provide a number, even if they never interact with the given number. Regardless of their reasons, you have probably given out your number a lot more times than you can remember. However, the man in this story has a pretty peculiar issue, as all these folks using his number have probably made it hard for him to, for example, sign up for other services.
Imagine creating a profile and getting the “this number is already in use” message when it’s quite literally your number that has been “wasted” on what must be a burner account. There is a reasonable chance that the people making these accounts aren’t trying to mess with someone in particular, but the result is the same.
Image credits: Getty Images / unsplash (not the actual photo)
But there is a good chance these folks were just lazy
Of course, there are a couple of reasons someone might be giving out fake numbers. The first is in case they decide to no-show anyway, they don’t have to risk their number being blacklisted or getting angry calls. This is not a great practice, but it’s at least understandable. However, there is also a chance that the person making the reservation wants to use a fake number to cheat.
Regardless, canceling the reservation made on your very real number seems like a reasonable thing to do. It comes with the territory, if you are going to use another number, you know, at least in theory, that you are risking the number’s owner doing something with it. At the very least, this can be a lesson for these Valentine’s day couples, that if you want a date to work, you had better commit.
All in all, it’s a pretty harmless approach, an actual example of “petty” revenge. It’s pretty entitled to just use random numbers, knowing full well that someone out there probably has it. After all, there is a chance that other folks with “often used fake numbers” get constant calls from restaurants and other places, asking if they are even going to show up.
Image credits: Hannah Busing / unsplash (not the actual photo)
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