What is the Shona Vortex?

It all started some years ago with a text message to my cell phone that wasn't for me. I didn't think much of it until a second text message followed that said "Shona I can't make it to Six Flags today" at which point I just had to write the person back. You see, my name is Shona and here is this person that I don't know, with an area code hundreds of miles away from my own, texting my phone, calling me by my name and telling me they can't make it to somewhere I never made plans to go that day. Turns out the texter's name was Daniel (a fellow Verizon customer) and we had a very pleasant and amusing exchange about how odd it was that the texts for his friend, also named Shona, somehow made it to my phone. Nice one, Verizon.

I have continued to get texts that were not for me (an average of 1.5 a day) to this day. Sometimes they have my name in them, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I write back, sometimes I just get annoyed and delete them. One day I got a text from Ginny who lives on the East Coast asking me if I wanted to play Guitar Hero. "I love Guitar Hero!" I texted back and we had a fun little exchange and I told her to say hello to her Shona for me and we looked each other up on myspace and I saved Ginny's number in my phone in case I got anymore texts from her on accident, but I haven't.

After years of this, I've decided to document them here in a blog for all to see. Maybe once I have a nice collection together Verizon will have a little more to say than "We can't control who sends you text messages."

As you'll see, they seem to come in clusters from the same # for a while then it changes. I've also decided to text these people back and let them know their messages are being posted online. They can get angry at me if they want, but I hope that they instead set their sights on Verizon because trust me, if it were up to me the only texts I'd get are the ones that are actually for me.

My guess is that for some ridiculous reason, Verizon's text messaging system is somehow referencing the name Shona when transmitting these messages instead of going by something more specific... like say a 7 digit phone number. There's not really any other explaination (that comes to my mind anyway, but feel free to post any ideas you may have) but I've been assured by Verizon reps that this is not how it works.

So here we go, my next post will be a list of texts, exactly as they appeared in my phone (type-o's and spelling mistakes and all) and in the same order.