Dial ‘H’ for Headache : Communication: An Escondido couple thought they were expanding their small business with a new 800 number. What they are getting instead is a plague of wrong numbers and maybe a hefty phone bill.

“I’m sorry, you have the wrong number.”

Janice and Joe Maples of Escondido have repeated that phrase hundreds of times in the past month. It’s a pain. But what really hurts is that the calls are costing them hundreds of dollars and tying up their business phone.

The Mapleses installed an 800 number a month ago in an effort to expand their small emergency preparedness kit business in Escondido by reaching out to customers and distributors throughout the country.

“It just triples our sales when we have our 800 number, and when people can get through,” said Janice Maples, who has distributors in four states and sends out catalogues of their emergency kits.

But, about the same time, New York state’s Department of Motor Vehicles began its own toll-free number for commercial truckers looking for information on getting a commercial driver’s license, a new state requirement.

The number of the New York information line was 1-800-CDL-INFO, but somehow the number has been getting lost in translation with many truckers dialing 1-800-CDL-HELP, which is the Maples’ number.

“These calls start early, early in the morning,” said Janice Maples, who with her husband distributes earthquake preparedness kits containing food, blankets and sanitary supplies.

“I’ve had calls as early as 2:45 in the morning from a bus driver who got the number in a bar,” said Janice Maples.

Maples doesn’t know exactly how much the mix-up has cost her, but she and her husband guess it will be more than $1,000, and they are anxiously waiting for the phone bill to arrive next week.

“We’re just starting out, and this is a killer. Things are hard enough as it is without complications like this,” Janice Maples said.

“I know that a man from the Ryder truck line called and told my husband that they got the number from the DMV. Even the sanitation department of New York has been calling me.”

Maples said she even received a call from a New York trucker saying that the number was on a freeway billboard near the Pennsylvania border. The DMV has heard a similar rumor, but has not found the billboard. The DMV said that they have not used billboards to advertise the information line, only brochures and posters.

For their part, DMV officials said that all brochures, packets and posters regarding a commercial driver’s license have had the correct number on it, and that they are not at fault.

“We are not distributing the Mapleses’ number,” said George Filieau, spokesman for the DMV. “It is conceivable that our employees confused the suffixes and in some instances may have given (truckers) that number to call instead of the correct number.”

Filieau said that, once the department became aware of the potential mix-up, it issued an electronic memo to all of its offices to alert employees that they may have been giving out the wrong number.

But Janice Maples said the calls have not stopped.

“These people are still giving my number out, and nothing I do works,” she said.

And, although the DMV refuses to accept blame, at least one elected official in New York offers evidence of the state’s mistake and who feels that the DMV owes the Mapleses.

“This is a total embarrassment to the state of New York,” said Francis O’Keefe, mayor of Glens Falls, N.Y., who found out about the wrong numbers from city employees who had called the number for information after getting it from the DMV. “I’m damned mad about it, this shouldn’t happen to a small business.”

Maples said she received more than one call from truckers in pay phones just outside DMV offices who had gotten the wrong number from DMV employees.

Maples said that, even if it is just an inadvertent mistake on the part of a handful of DMV employees, she still should receive restitution.

“What they said is we’re sorry, that they realize that this is a mix-up and that it’s costing us money, but they can’t get anyone in the upper levels to give us restitution to us financially,” she said. “Their suggestion to us would be to get an attorney and sue.”

“It doesn’t matter to me how they got the number, the DMV is responsible for their people. If my employees did something wrong, it would be a reflection on me, and I would be responsible for it,” she said.

The DMV, however, doesn’t see it that way.

Although DMV officials say they sympathize with the Mapleses’ position, they have no plans to compensate them.

Legal action “in fact may be the only alternative because one of the problems here is how can we authorize New York taxpayer money for payment to a company that can’t verify that these phone calls result from something that the DMV did,” Filieau said. “Who is going to prove that these phone calls resulted from our employees giving out the number?”

Short of tape recording the phone calls, Filieau said he doesn’t see how the Mapleses could prove that the calls are coming from truckers who have been misdirected by the DMV as opposed to truckers who may have gotten the numbers confused themselves or who had seen the number in a different context.

He conceded, however, that it is likely that at least some of the calls that the Mapleses are getting may have been the result of mistakes by DMV employees.

“We don’t think that we’ve done anything wrong that requires us to compensate them,” Filieau said. “An inadvertent slip of the tongue by an employee, we don’t know that we are responsible for paying that back.”

Mayor O’Keefe said he has tried to help by contacting the New York secretary of state’s office, which then contacted the DMV.

“Their response was that they got in touch with Mr. and Mrs. Maples, and they’re trying to straighten out the situation, and they’ll get their money back,” O’Keefe said.

But the Mapleses have yet to hear from anyone in the New York DMV.

“They have never called us, all the communication has been one-sided, us calling them,” Janice Maples said.