You've heard the stories -- stories that surface with nearly predictable frequency -- about the person who calls a 1-800 number and is connected with a customer service representative who delivers a much more personal variety of service.

This always seems to happen to elderly people -- they call to complain about their cable service or something and they wind up talking to someone named Tiffani who's offering to show them a good time -- and by good time, she doesn't mean a bus trip to the slot parlor.

This isn't one of those stories.

It may involve customer service of a personal nature, but it's a lot weirder, and the customer service part of it is, well, you'll see.

It began a few months ago when this guy was having trouble with his cell phone. He called customer service and got some woman in Oklahoma. He described the problem, and the customer service representatives took care of it, and they continued to talk, and one thing led to another and, well, they kind of flirted and it didn't go any further.

The rep, though, did give him another phone number to call, later.

The guy called the number later. It was the woman's home phone number. After some brief flirtation, the woman and the guy had phone sex, giving the phrase customer service a whole new meaning.

The guy's wife -- who said she didn't want her name in the paper because of the pain and humiliation caused by this episode -- said the woman caught her husband at a vulnerable time, by which I think

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she meant that he was breathing.

"He liked it," she said. "He's a man."

Ouch.

Before we rejoin the story, I'd like to say that the wife's explanation of his enjoyment of the phone activity was a generalization and that this guy perhaps isn't representative of all men -- just most of them.

Now, most people would be kind of creeped out if a person they've never met, who lives in another time zone, started saying things to them on the phone that could pass for Academy-Award-winning dialogue on the movies they show late at night on some of the cable channels and would cut it off at the outset.

The guy wasn't, though. The phone contact, so to speak, continued.

There did come a time when he did become creeped out.

Or at least that's what he told his wife after she had borrowed his phone a few weeks ago and found a message from the woman requesting more conjugal phone calls. She asked him about it and he  'fessed up, saying it had been going on for about three months -- and at first he kind of liked it, but now he was trying to cut it off, to no avail.

"It just got to be too much," he told her.

He set about trying to end it. The woman on the other end wouldn't hear of it. The guy's wife thinks the woman has some issues that go beyond a desire to talk dirty to strangers on the phone.

The guy's wife said she called the woman and asked her to knock it off.

She told her she wouldn't.

She told the guy's wife that he was hers now and that she was going to continue calling the woman's husband and having anatomically correct conversations.

They contacted the cell-phone company and the company said it would look into it. The couple doesn't know what happened at that end -- an unnamed supervisor offered an apology and offered to change the guy's cell-phone number for no charge. The guy got a new cell-phone number and they thought that would be that.

But then, the calls continued. Somehow, the woman had gotten his new phone number.

He was still getting calls from the woman last week. He said he hung up on the woman.

"We just want it to stop," the guy's wife said.

I called the company involved. Without having much information about the woman, the spokesman said there wasn't much he could do. He thought it sounded like a scam. He wrote in an e-mail, "At this point, I'm puzzled as to how I could respond."

The woman wrote to the paper saying she wanted "to warn women (and some men) about customer service representatives."

She concluded: "Of course, my husband is (here she had originally written "not," but crossed it out apparently on second thought) to blame as much as this rep, so please be aware that this goes on, probably much more than people realize, and three people's lives have been ruined because of it."

The three lives being the guy, his wife and the customer service rep, who may or may not have been canned.

So consider yourself warned.

Most people, when they complain about customer service, it's because they don't get enough service.

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.inyork.com/ydr - click on the opinion section - or visit his blog at www.mikeargento.com.