Caller: Hello! I was hoping you folks could help me out.
Me: Yes? [Me, thinking: Sounds like someone is looking for legal advice, probably on employment law (those are the calls I mostly get from laypeople, because of my workplace harassment law online materials). Need to find someone to refer him to.]
Caller: I was just on a flight last night from Vancouver to Los Angeles . . . .
[Me, thinking: Some supposed illegal search, racial profiling, or whatever else? Why would he have called me?]
Caller: . . . and my bags were supposed to arrive . . .
[Me, thinking: Unconstitutional search and seizure.]
Caller: . . . but they didn’t, and I was hoping you could help me find them.
It turns out he didn’t dial 1 before the ten-digit phone number he was supposed to call, and thus called my number in the West L.A. 206 prefix instead of an Alaska Airlines number in Seattle. (I’d gotten calls like that before, I realized.)
Sometimes a looming constitutional question is really just a wrong number.
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