My dad’s a GP and he’s been using the same mobile number for the last 25 years, so everyone knows it. Recently, he’s grown more and more exhausted and resentful towards people who, in a way, abuse his patience, especially out of office hours (there’s a severe shortage of GPs and HCPs in general in Italy, so relationships with thousands of patients of a private practice when you’re just one person can feel like being mauled and wrestled among ferocious jungle animals, I guess). We managed to persuade him to the idea of using a separate phone with a separate number, just for family and few selected people who… have the right to invade his private life, let’s put it that way.

I bought him a Pixel 8a and a brand new SIM card (reminder: we live in Italy), with a shiny-new number that’s also quite easy to remember. To an Italian ear, “320” is a relatively old-sounding mobile prefix, but this didn’t raise any flag for me when I read the number for the first time. All this happened over the last week. I finished most data migration, general setup of accounts and apps, the case arrived – one of those cases with a front flap that opens like a book; a type of case I hate, but he literally can’t hold his phone any other way, he holds it from the case like a book; he went caseless for about three months before destroying his old phone because it just slips out of his bearish grip, so…

Well, we’re supposed to give him this new phone today. Three people know his new phone number right now: me, my mom and my sister – not even he knows it! But apparently, his brand new, entirely unknown phone number isn’t exactly unknown.

Hello, can I talk to you for a second?

Yeah. He doesn’t even have the phone yet, he doesn’t even know his number… yet this morning, I woke up to the first scam WhatsApp text. I guess that with his blind luck the phone company assigned him an old, previously deactivated phone number. As Chief Technology Officer of the family, I hope this won’t mean more problems to solve.