This evening a friend and I were riding down in an elevator. Several other people got in, people we didn’t know. One of them, looking down at his cell phone, said to his friends “Somebody just replied to my text, but I didn’t send a text.”
One of his friends told him “It must have been a wrong number.”
I know you’re not supposed to cross conversational groups in crowded elevators, but this seemed like a good moment to be helpful. “You know what you need to do,” I told him. “Text it forward. Send a reply to somebody else. Maybe you can keep the chain going. You never know — this could be the start of a new cultural movement.”
Everyone seemed to really like this idea. “Just think,” somebody said, “one day people will realize that it all started right here, in this very elevator.”
I once sent a text to my friend in France to the wrong (French) number and got the response “miss u a lot sis! life is not the same without u!”
And that was how I found my long lost sister.