Imagine you receive a call from your friend, you pick the call and some minutes through the conversation, your friends voice ghosts away and out-of-nowhere you hear this,

The number you have dialled is incorrect. Please check the number and dial again.

What the heck, right? You did not even dial this call. You received the call which means by default that the number is valid. That’s exactly what has been happening to me on calls for a few days now. Strange and weird.

Before this…

For months now, many of my family members and friends have told me how when they call me, they get robot voices that tell them that I’m out of coverage area or my phone is switched off when I’m in a place with good network and using my phone perfectly. There are network bars and I’m browsing the net. Moreover, I have faced this issue being in Pune, Mumbai and even in Karnataka’s countryside. Once I even checked it myself by dialling my number from a friend’s cellphone. This isn’t a consistent issue though but intermittent one. I do receive calls but not all the calls that are dialled reach me through. I have complained to Idea Support in past and again now a few days back. In past they have asked me to switch off — switch on, remove the SIM card, wipe it and put back, select manual network etc. After none of this worked out they finally asked me to go to a nearby Idea centre and exchange my SIM card. I went to two of their service centres and have returned without any success. Apparently, in their system, they have entered my birth date wrongly and now they are asking me to provide proof with this other birth date which is just impossible. All the proofs that I have with me have the same birth date which is not matching with their records. No surprise there. And they can’t exchange my SIM card unless I show them an identity card with the birth date they have in their system (which is the WRONGDATE!). I told them to check the proof I provided while buying SIM but they just repeat the line that I have to provide them with identity proof with wrong birth-date. It’s as if they do not hear what I’m trying to tell them.

For months I have tried to ignore this until a few weeks back when I received an email from the recruiter saying that they have been trying to contact me for some time now but were unable to. I thanked them for dropping the mail; their mail woke me up to the important calls I must have missed. Also now, it wasn’t just missing calls from people but even the calls that I was receiving would abruptly end and torture me with “You’ve dialled a wrong number…”; so I registered a new complaint a few days ago. Yesterday they called me in the late evening. Something extraordinary happened. After a few seconds in the call, the customer rep’s voice vanished and I got,

The number you have dialled is incorrect. Please check the number and dial again.

Yes. The problem is, it is I who get this and not the person at the other end. And immediately after this, I received an SMS.

To their credit, they did try again to call me but I believe they weren’t able to reach me through for I received another similar text as above.

And then, after some time I received a call which I was able to answer and complete without being interrupted by the robotic voice. Guess why were they calling me? The guy at the other end tells me that he was calling me to tell me that my issue has been resolved. RESOLVED. I explained to him the irony of it. He says he will inform the network team. I don’t even know what that means and will he do it. How am I to trust this dunderhead when after two failed attempts to reach me the person had the temerity to tell me my issue has been resolved.

The guy repeated how he will inform the network team that my issue isn’t resolved and all. And then this happened. Another SMS.

I called them and they told me to wait for 24 hours. I did. I waited for five days and then, another call, another Robo-message informing me I have dialled a wrong number on a call that I received from another side!

They have taken fresh complaint now and have told me this time they will resolve it completely. I will update this post once they inform me they have resolved the issue and one week passes since that SMS without any further torture.

Is anyone else facing a similar issue with the Idea network? Please write below in comments.