Social Security?

[MyEccentricHell]

The call center I work in has two automated greetings when someone first calls in to us.
Greeting 1: "Thank you for calling ***** & *****, if you know your party's name please say it now or say Operator"

Greeting 2 (right before I come on the line): Thank you for calling ***** & ***** Pharmaceutical, how may I help you?"

Here's a replay of the caller I just had.

Caller - "I need to speak with someone about my social security."
Me - "Are you a retiree of the company?"
Caller - "What company?"
Me - ??? "***** & *****"
Caller - "No"
Me - "I'm sorry I think you may have dialed the wrong number, you currently have ***** & ***** Pharmaceutical on the line"
Caller - "Well how do I have you? I wanted the Social Security in Georgia"
Me - "I'm sorry you appear to have misdialed, you might want to try the number again"
Caller - "Well what's their number?"
Me - "The number for the Social Security office in Georgia?"
Caller - "Yes"
Me - "I'm sorry but we do not have access to those numbers"
Caller - "Why not?"
Me - "Because this is a pharmaceutical company, we only have access to our company directories"
Caller - ******Sighs & hangs up******

I'm still shaking my head a little over this.

[FuzzyKitten99]

At least she got a person. Wells Fargo has an employee resource line, basically HR with menus and such so you can hear your benefits options and change stuff. Anyhow, the prefix for it was 1-866-HRWELLS, easy to remember-kinda. However if you forgot that and instead dialed 1-800-HRWELLS, you'd get a phone sex line. I kid you not. It happened to at least two people in each training class. They'd call to set up their benefits, but instinctively dialed 800 instead of 877, and you'd hear something like "Oh my God!" or "WTF??" from in the central employee rec area.

[penguingeekgod]

At least she got a person. Wells Fargo has an employee resource line, basically HR with menus and such so you can hear your benefits options and change stuff. Anyhow, the prefix for it was 1-866-HRWELLS, easy to remember-kinda. However if you forgot that and instead dialed 1-800-HRWELLS, you'd get a phone sex line. I kid you not. It happened to at least two people in each training class. They'd call to set up their benefits, but instinctively dialed 800 instead of 877, and you'd hear something like "Oh my God!" or "WTF??" from in the central employee rec area.

A company my dad worked for had the same issue for a main office, but the only # difference was the LAST digit.

[flybye023]

I had a SS call once. Turns out the person was dialing his SSN.

[Samaliel]

At least she got a person. Wells Fargo has an employee resource line, basically HR with menus and such so you can hear your benefits options and change stuff. Anyhow, the prefix for it was 1-866-HRWELLS, easy to remember-kinda. However if you forgot that and instead dialed 1-800-HRWELLS, you'd get a phone sex line. I kid you not. It happened to at least two people in each training class. They'd call to set up their benefits, but instinctively dialed 800 instead of 877, and you'd hear something like "Oh my God!" or "WTF??" from in the central employee rec area.

Aren't the 1-800 numbers toll free ? I've never heard of such a service that was free...

[Moggie]

I used to work for a travel agency with a 1-888 number. If you dialed 1-800 or 1-900 (which is not always a pay line outside the US), you got a phone sex line.

We actually had a woman call us screaming and threatening to sue us because she "had to get a divorce". Turns out her huband "got confused" and racked up several thousand dollars of play time when he was supposed to be calling for information on changing his flights.

After the office in general got done boggling at how this was supposed to be our fault, we hung up on her ranting

[DesignFox]

They'd call to set up their benefits, but instinctively dialed 800 instead of 877, and you'd hear something like "Oh my God!" or "WTF??" from in the central employee rec area.

One of the companies I worked for had a similar situation. The customer service line was 866 and a phone sex line was 800. My store manager used to purposely give the phone sex line to nasty customers.

[bainsidhe]

To answer a previous question, the 800 numbers usually direct you to enter a credit card number to be transferred or will give the 900 number for you to call. In high school we used to make up 800 numbers and call from the pay phone so we could laugh and poke fun at the phone sex lines. These were toll-free numbers, so we didn't have to pay. It wasn't difficult to come up with numbers like 1-800-BLOW-JOB for example. Stupid I know, but in my defense we were bored

[hinakiba777]

That happens to me at the museum. People call thinking it's the corner store. I tell them it's not. I always get the same response. "Oh, what's the number for the store?"

My usual answer is that i don't know. But officially I have been told "To tell them this isn't the damn operator. And they should get a phone book."

[Samaliel]

To answer a previous question, the 800 numbers usually direct you to enter a credit card number to be transferred or will give the 900 number for you to call. In high school we used to make up 800 numbers and call from the pay phone so we could laugh and poke fun at the phone sex lines. These were toll-free numbers, so we didn't have to pay. It wasn't difficult to come up with numbers like 1-800-BLOW-JOB for example. Stupid I know, but in my defense we were bored

I find this to be strange. Given that sex sells, I'd think that phone sex lines would be overtaxed. The cheapest ones around here are 1.34€ on connection + 0.54€ per minute, or something like that. Some are charged like a call to a foreign country would be.