Sir Graham Lister

In 1992, an AA employee called Jason Pegler was walking home from work in Dover, England, when he walked past a public telephone box. As he did so, the phone started ringing. His curiosity piqued, he decided to answer it. To his absolute astonishment, the call was for…him On the other end of the line was his colleague, Sue Hamilton. She apologised for disturbing him and asked for help with the office fax machine, which she couldn’t get to work. Jason was dumbfounded. ‘Hold on Sue, how could you possibly know I was beside this particular phone box?’, asked Jason. Confused, Sue didn’t understand the question. ‘What do you mean,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t this your home number?’ Jason explained that he was still on his way home, and that he’d simply heard a public phone ringing as he walked past and decided to pick it up. (And this is where it gets genuinely bonkers.) When Sue checked the number she’d dialled, she finally worked out what had happened. She had mistaken his AA *staff* number for his home telephone number! By what must be the maddest coincidence of their respective lives, that staff number was also the number of the public phone box in Dover that Jason was passing just at the moment she called. Sue had dialled the wrong number, but reached the right person.