On Tuesday, during a cabinet meeting held to provide an update on the outbreak of fungal meningitis, Florida Governor Rick Scott made an embarrassing mistake: While providing the toll-free hotline number for meningitis patients, he kindly provided a hotline number for phone sex.
It was not apparent whether the Governor read out the phone sex number from among the listed hotlines in his address book, but Scott’s spokeswoman Jackie Schultz clarified for skeptics that the governor had ‘misread’ the number inadvertently.
Scott’s office says the correct phone number for the Florida Fungal Meningitis Hotline is 866-523-7339, but the governor mixed up a digit and made the error, which he later rectified.
Callers, who used the first Meningitis hotline number given out by the Governor, were greeted with a woman’s voice saying “Hello boys, thank you for calling me on my anniversary.”
Finding that particular cure curious for meningitis, people called up the public radio station, which was monitoring the cabinet meeting and had posted the hotline number on its website, as soon as the Governor announced it.
The radio station, in its turn, alerted the governor’s office about the error after, as according to the radio station, being “quickly notified by a reader that the number (for meningitis hotline) instead connected to an adult telephone line.”
After being informed of the error, the governor corrected himself within 20 minutes of committing the ‘phone sex to cure meningitis’ gaffe, and announced the proper phone number before the cabinet meeting concluded.
According to a recent tally by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention made on Wednesday, at least 138 people have contracted meningitis this year and 12 persons have died including one in Florida.