Wrong Number, Right Man

The garage had had my car for nine days, my patience for six of them. On the tenth morning I rehearsed a speech, dialled from a scrap of paper on which their number was written in my own terrible handwriting, and delivered the entire tirade — gearbox, courtesy car, 'family business my foot' — without pausing for breath.

A silence. Then an unfamiliar, unhurried Scottish voice: 'That's shocking service, right enough. I can fix your gearbox, but I'm in Aberdeen, so the towing might sting.'

Wrong number. My sevens look like ones; the stranger I had verbally flattened was a marine mechanic five hundred miles away, on his tea break, and instead of hanging up he had listened to two full minutes of transmission grievance out of what he later called 'professional curiosity and the fact you didn't breathe.'

I apologised. He talked me through what the garage was probably doing wrong, in the manner of a man translating hostage negotiations, and told me exactly what to say to them. It worked so well the garage manager asked if I had spoken to a lawyer. 'A mechanic in Aberdeen,' I said, and his face did something complicated.

I rang the wrong number back to report victory, because it seemed only fair. That call lasted an hour. The next one, three. He drove down 'to hear the gearbox for himself' in August — for a car that by then worked perfectly, a fact neither of us mentioned.

We married two years later. At the reception his best man read out the odds of misdialling one specific valid eleven-digit number: unimpressive, he admitted, until you add the conditions that the recipient answers, stays on the line for an unprovoked tirade, is a mechanic, is single, and finds fury endearing.

My sevens still look like ones. He guards that scrap of paper in his toolbox, laminated.