I have a Google Voice number that doesn’t port to a phone, but I receive email notifications anytime someone leaves a message or sends a text to the number. The only messages I get are spam, but last night, I got a very strange voicemail.

You can read the transcript below.

A really fun school. It looks like they can't miss more than 5 days during the first. I don't know 15 days of school. I read everything on that on that website cuz I wanted to know all about it. But yeah, but she doesn't miss school anyway, so I'm not worried about that. Yeah. So anyway another question. She never she never calls me back. I have called her a number of times and she doesn't call me back. So I've been ghosted by her. Dad. Oh really? It's not good. I thought she was in la la land. It has anger issues. Well, yeah, she and she told your dad that she was afraid that he was going to blame her for not getting this job. But I just told her that I just told her that that she's going to get a better job. She'll get it a lot of times things work out like that. And if he has anger the issues she gets better dump him and You know what? She's too young to get married. I got to tell you. I was 19 when I got married and I was stupid. I mean I was right intellectually until my school work straight ahead. She's avoiding me because of what? I don't know. I don't know but still young to get married. She's not even fully developed it as her her mental. I mean her mind is not fully developed yet. Don't tell her I told you this but you know, I think you're more than she is. More perceptive. Let me put it that way. I'm not saying you're more intelligence. perceptive Yeah. Who's calling you your friend? Well, you could make him. Wait. Do you don't have to talk to him because you're not your boyfriend anymore. Is he? Oh, come on, you went back to him. Oh friend. Damn talking to my grandmother. I'll call you back.

I was so confused about what this was. I thought maybe it was some sort of spam call, but I couldn’t figure out the angle. It’s obviously the middle of a phone conversation, but I can’t tell how it was recorded. You can hear the grandmother more clearly than the granddaughter that she’s talking to. How and why was the middle of this conversation recorded and sent to my voicemail?

Years ago, I used to receive faxes from a doctor’s office to this number, but I had the number with RingCentral back then. They would come in pretty regularly, and I figured out that the receiving office had almost the same number that I had, but two of the numbers were swapped. Every month I would recieve dozens of pages of medical records. They were lucky they were sending them to me and not someone without scruples. After receiving 57 pages of medical records in 24 hours, filled with very sensitive information about patients, including names, phone numbers, addresses, and even social security numbers, I sent a fax back to the sender explaining the situation. I may or may not have mentioned HIPPA somewhere in the note as well. I never recieved another fax from them again.

That was obviously human error, but this voicemail thing is a computer error, meaning if it happened once and it hasn’t been caught and fixed, it could happen again. It’s got me wondering how many of my phone conversations have been left on a stranger’s voicemail, and oh god, what did I say?