Today I woke up to my mobile alarm clock in the dead of the night. Struggling to understand why it’s still so dark outside, I regained consciousness just to realize it was actually an incoming call on my mobile, at 2am local London time.

You normally don’t expect a call in a middle of the night, and it happens, it’s kind of foreboding – is that an emergency? Has something terrible happened? And you just hope not to see your “Mom” or “Dad” on your phone screen. Well, that wasn’t them. My phone was showing an American mobile number, and even – obligingly – the town from where the call originated. Spokane, WA. Damn it.

About a week ago, I was rambling through the websites of different universities and business schools, checking out their MBA programs. Not real urge, but I was considering getting an eMBA degree in the future. One of the “Top 20 MBA schools” ratings contained the Washington State University program among others . I had visited WSU once before, so being curious, I went to their website to read more. In order to get a PDF brochure with the program details, they asked me to enter my name, e-mail and – for some reason – my mobile phone number. So I did, entering the full number, with an explicit country code of UK (+44).

The Washington State University is located in Pullman, WA. And yes, the nearest larger city is Spokane. The staff from WSU were calling me at 2am.

The call went off, soon followed by a sound of incoming SMS – the caller has left a voice mail. In the morning I listened to the message – some gentlemen was happy to inform me that according to their records, I had shown interest in their MBA program, so why wouldn’t I give a call to them to discuss, whenever it’d be convenient for me.

Well, my normal plan would be to wait until it’s 3am in Washington, and then call them back, asking how exactly, while neither being familiar with the concept of time zones, nor capable of figuring a country code from a mobile number, these lovely folks would make their way to some MBA top rankings.

But then I decided I were just being a wimp, approached by the famous American energetic proactiveness, and this could be a good business lesson to me, a sluggish clumsy European.

Nah, kidding, I simply don’t have the mobile number of the guy who was calling, only his office number. No real fun in making an office phone ring in the middle of the night really – as if a tree falls down in the forest and there’s no one to hear it…

Dear Washington State University! Please remove me from your MBA list. I don’t deserve you!