It’s no secret that corporations will hardly ever do the right thing unless forced to by their bottom line.

This story, though, proves even that might not be enough motivation.

OP’s family’s home phone number was very close to the number of the local Pizza Hut.

The end result of this story, which I will tell you upfront, is that we lost the ability to order from several local Pizza-Huts …for lyfe…

Used to we had a phone number that was very similar to a Pizza-Hut, their number was (555)455-5575 and ours was (555)455-5515. Now these two numbers are commonly mixed up for obvious reasons.

This was back before the days of cellphones and everyone having their own personal number, and we actually had to get a caller ID because of this.

For years we had this Pizza-Huts client base call our house (about 50/50 split sober/drunk) and order pizzas.

The thing is people WILL NOT LISTEN when you tell them “Sorry wrong number” we would have drunk people call back 4-5 times and then begin screaming into the phone “I KNOW THIS IS A F—— PIZZAHUT YOU A——!” or “GIVE ME THE NUMBER OR I’LL KICK YOUR A–.”

This was pretty normal and the pizza hut was even aware of this and profusely apologized when we would call them. (Never giving us anything for free though, despite the massive inconvenience of the phone ringing off the hook.)

The trouble dialed up a notch (heh) when they took out a billboard and accidentally put OP’s family number on the Pizza Hut advertisement instead of the right one.

Well Pizza Hut Corporate then pays for an advertisement on paper, bill-board, and phone book. And guess what?

They botched the number they put OUR number on the things for the phone number as one of the locations in our town for Pizza Huts pizza.

Why? Because 1’s and 7’s are the same number apparently.

The phone calls we get F—— EXPLODES. It goes from like 3-5 phone calls a day to like 100-200.

Initially we were directing people with a message that simply said “THIS IS NOT PIZZA HUT! THEIR NUMBER IS XXXXXXXX”

It didn’t end. We would get calls with people screaming into the voice recording “I WANT A F—— PIZZA THIS IS BULL I’M GOING TO K— WHOEVER DOESN’T ANSWER THIS F—— PHONE!” (Aren’t boomers great? We got that all the time from older people.)

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told to k— myself for trying to direct someone to the correct place, and for some reason no one EVER listens.

Their dad tried to reason with them. He begged.

Well upon this happening my Dad calls into the pizza hut and says “look, all we want is to not have to change our number. If you guys will PLEASE change yours, or pay for ours to be changed (it was like a 10 dollar convince fee or some shit.) we will stop getting your damned phone calls.”

The manager cussed my Dad, who had him on speaker phone, calling him names and for “getting him bad reviews” as well as losing customers to his branch, which is locally owned.

What a joke. Its costing their business a solid 10 grand EASY over a phone number why not JUST CHANGE IT? IDK.

My Dad looks at the phone, hangs up and says “Ok a—-, you want to be like that about it?”

When it didn’t work, OP and his sister started messing with everyone who called.

My dad then instructs My 17 year old self (and my sister) to take all calls from now on.

If it rings pick it up, take the order, and say “Ok your pizza should be there in (1.5 hours)” Then when they call back to tell them “Sorry the driver just left.” and if they call back a third time say “Well I can get you on the phone with my manager but he’s probably going to kick your a– if you keep complaining.”

And then switch the phone with someone else and have them say “Listen here, you aren’t getting your pizza and we are keeping your money, get over it.”

Or something along those lines anyway.

Their dad tried again to reason with the local manager. Nothing doing.

Two weeks pass and my Dad tries to get said Pizza Hut to change our number for free. Never pointing out that they messed up their ad, as apparently they were completely oblivious to this fact.

Again the manager screams at my Dad saying “I don’t have the money to change your number!”

We even tried calling OTHER pizza huts to get the issue resolved, and their corporate with no real luck. Fair enough, its game on time now why?

For two reasons 1. My dad got a phone with a transfer button and 2. Because summer was rolling around, and me and my sister loved messing with people over this. It was a really bad influence on us tbh.

They got a phone with a transfer button and let their friends in on the gig.

We fielded phone calls every day all day long, we had friends come over and they loved partaking in the same thing. We had a general plan:

Every other call would get a pizza “delivery” On the other calls we would get them really mad talking crap to them and saying “Ok do you want to speak with my manager?”

And just cold transfer them to the pizza hut. It took 6 more weeks of us doing this, and the pizza hut closed.

Corporate called to make their own threats, but had no leg to stand on.

A few weeks before they closed we got a phone call from pizza hut corporate who more or less threatened us with a cease and desist sounded like they didn’t really understand what was actually happening as it accused us of “stealing their phone calls.”

LMFAO.

We called their corporate and explained what was going on, and even played our recordings of talking with them before about the issue and ignoring us.

All they said is “You had better stop! This is ILLEGAL!” over and over.

We didn’t stop. They were aware of what was going on and didn’t want to do anything about it because to fix their FUBAR.

Eventually the (ex)manager stopped calling, too.

A few weeks after the owner lost his job he called our house and was trying to argue with my Dad about how “bad of a person he was because I lost money, and got my a– beat several times.” …apparently we had p—– a few people off so bad they actually went in and attacked him and other staff…

To this day it cracks me up that a company can be so oblivious, and is the single reason I don’t believe we live in anything close to a “Meritocracy” anyone in this position who has any merit would instantly change the number, but not a corporation who has money to sue, and not a middle manager who has an ego problem.

This is a wild ride. Is Reddit glad they hopped on?

Oddly, others have had similar experiences.

This would be even higher stakes.

No one feels sorry for Pizza Hut.

The issue could have been easily fixed.

Talk about a costly stalemate.

I wonder if the manager is posting somewhere about his pro regrets.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.