So, I forget what grade I was in but I know I was in high school. I had just recently gotten a phone, like, really recently. I wanted to tell my friends all about it because I was still super excited at the time. So one of my friends, when told I had a phone now, asked for my number. She then proceeded to, as a joke, send a voicemail since I still wasn’t allowed to bring my phone to school just yet. In that voicemail she was just yelling complete nonsense. Of course that was just hilarious to me and all of my friends, really it was a riot.
Later however when I had gotten home from the school day and had been home for a few hours I finally remembered that happening. I decided to listen to the voicemail just for the fun of it. Again that was all fun and dandy, but then I decided I wanted to finally make a call on my phone back from hearing the voicemail. Most likely my friend had completely forgotten what she had done earlier in the day. So I called the number that belonged to the voicemail, because well, that number was obviously my friend’s phone. What I did next was not the brightest idea, since in the voicemail my friend had been yelling, I decided to be yelling first thing on the call.
So when I connected, I immediately said, “I got your voicemail!” to which my friend responded in a shaky voice, “what…” which I thought meant she might be going through something at the moment and maybe it wasn’t a good time to call. I then said, “oh, is this not a good time?” to which she responded, “who is this?” so at that point I realized she hadn’t known it was me calling. I gave my name, which at first made her think I was someone else she knew with the same name, which I corrected by giving my last name and telling her where she knew me from. She said to me then, “Oh, I thought you were a stranger and you were saying like, I got you now or something. You scared me to death.” At that point she was kind of sniffling and giving a weak laugh to regain her composure.
I felt absolutely terrible, I should’ve known she might not have put me into her phone yet. She had now gone through what at first she thought was a scary stranger telling her that he had her now, and I can believe my voice sounded different enough on the phone for the first time to really make her believe something like that. All I meant to do was joke back from her voicemail and that became something much more serious in a few moments than it was meant to be.
I apologized I don’t know how many times after that, I couldn’t stop feeling awful for a good while. Looking back it’s obvious there’s quite a few things I could’ve done differently, hindsight is 2020 after all. I could’ve just let the voicemail joke be as it was without response, I could’ve just texted her back, or called her like a normal person in a normal voice and say who I was in case she hadn’t put me in her phone yet, which she hadn’t.
