My friend Moke and I are experiencing a cosmic cell phone link. What could cause this to happen?

June 7, 2008 9:35 AM

My friend Moke and I are experiencing a cosmic cell phone link. What could cause this to happen?

My friend Moke and I are experiencing a cosmic cell phone link.

What seems to be happening is some of Moke's phone calls are redirected to my cell phone. It doesn't seem like my calls are going to him, but when I try to call him I get my voicemail instead. When he tries to call me, he gets his voicemail.

It only seems to happen when we are geographically close to each other. It doesn't happen all the time either, it seems to be random.

What could cause this to happen?

posted by doomtop to technology (10 comments total)

This doesn't really answer your question, but a similar thing happens to me and my mother-in-law, whose phone is part of our family service through Cingular/AT&T Wireless. She doesn't have voice mail set up and when I call her it goes straight to my own voice mail -- I haven't verified, but this might only happen if she's already on the phone with someone else. When someone else (not me) calls her, her phone sometimes tells her that it's me calling. I've always suspected there was a bug in the call routing software that is triggered by our situation (same plan, she doesn't have voice mail), though this doesn't happen to my husband even though his phone is on the same account.
posted by ellenaim at 10:10 AM on June 7

Call the phone company?
posted by mpls2 at 10:37 AM on June 7

Have the phones been bluetooth paired?
posted by wilko at 10:53 AM on June 7

What do the phones share, in common, at the network level? Are they, or have they ever been, on the same package? Did you buy them at the same time? Register them at the same time? Have you ever call-forwarded to each other's phones? Or both phones to a 3rd number?

Mobile calls get misdirected on occasion, but for a call to end up on the phone of someone you know is really weird, IMO.
posted by Leon at 11:41 AM on June 7

Your friend has his number configured to forward calls to your phone under some conditions.

That's why you get some of his calls, and why you get your own voicemail when you call him.
He probably set this up when he was waiting for an important call, and then forgot about it.
posted by TravellingDen at 12:06 PM on June 7

The phones are not nor have they ever been part of the same package. They are not even the same carrier. He uses Verizon and I am on Unicel. We didn't buy or register them at the same time.

Neither of us has ever setup call forwarding. I am assuming either Moke or myself would have to have made some sort of request to activate this happening, which neither of us has ever done.

I'd call the phone company and maybe they can make it not happen, but it's not really a huge issue just a little inconvenient. Most of all, I'd like to know what is causing this to happen and I have a feeling the phone company won't tell me even if they are able to discover the cause.
posted by doomtop at 1:25 PM on June 7

This isn't the same situation, but at one time my home phone (BT) suddenly started ringing my best friend's house whenever I dialled the number to connect to voicemail (1571). We never worked out why it did this, and it stopped doing it just as suddenly as it started. So you're not alone...
posted by badmoonrising at 3:09 PM on June 7

Could a mutual friend have done it as a bit of a juvenile joke?
posted by taff at 3:38 AM on June 8

Have the pair of you ever left your phones unattended in the presence of a third friend? Possibly not at the same time.
posted by Helga-woo at 6:21 AM on June 8

Oh, and obviously, I can't read. What taff said.
posted by Helga-woo at 6:21 AM on June 8