Don't you find the telephone ringing annoying?

For a number of years, we kept the ringer off on our phone. The only notification we had of a phone call was the quiet click of the answering machine. If someone thought their call was important enough to leave a message, we would eventually hear their voice.

In the last couple of years, we've got a new phone number which for some reason doesn't get many sales calls, and our friends only call us at home if it's important. So we've been able to leave the ringer on these days and still have peace.

I still can't get over the DSL gouging in the UK. I just swapped provider in Hong Kong. I now have 3Mb/512k for GBP 16 / month on a 3 month contract. If I'd wanted to sign for 12 months or longer I could have probably got down to a tenner or so. And in Japan I can have 100 Mb fiber-to-the-door for less than GBP 50 /month.

On the other hand, I can't get fresh Jaffa cakes in either place.

Regards

Mark

My rule of thumb for a ringing telephone is, "Is there anybody I want to talk to more than whatever I am doing right now?" and the answer is inevitably NO.

This has been an interesting benefit of going cell phone only. If I have it on me, it is in silent mode since I will feel the vibration. I can easily and quickly take it out of my pocket, look at the caller ID, and decide if I want to answer. If not, I hit a reject call button, and they leave me a message that I can listen to at my leisure. Or, if I know for certain I don't want any calls, I have the power button. Turn it back on later, and if it tells me I have new messages, I can listen to them then.

Bah. You think that's bad? When I lived in Alberta (back when we still had rotary phones), my family had a phone number of 320-9876. It was a magnet for crank-calls.

My previous phone number was 333-6699. All those buttons are near the right side of the phone, so little kids playing with the phone could reach them. 2 or 3 times a week I'd get a call from a 2 year old playing with the phone. At first I was irritated, but then I found it kind of amusing.

me: "hello"
<silence>
<giggling>
me: "are you playing with the phone?"
<pause>"yeah."
me: "how old are you?"
kid: "3".

Pretty funny.

Supposedly Steve Wozniak once got the toll-free phone number 888-888-8888 but gave it up when he got more ... prank (?) ... phone calls than he could handle, supposedly mostly from kids playing with the phone.

We (in my company's Tech Support) will occasionally get calls from dialer owners. The call goes something like:

"Can you help me? I want my dialer to dial one number on every line until it gets through."
"Yes, we can help. It's usually not standard operating procedure to call one number over and over, however."
"Well, see, there's this concert in town, and we can't get thru to tickmaster/ticket office." or "The world series is coming up, and my office would like tickets."

So, we'll get them set up to dial 800-xxx-xxxx on 320 lines, all at once, until their one agent, waiting for the call to get thru, will.

It don't happen that often, but sometimes it's amusing. They're using their $40k machine to hammer away to get $8 tickets. ($20 if going thru Ticketmaster.)

Me.

So, we'll get them set up to dial 800-xxx-xxxx on 320 lines, all at once

When I was working in the telecom industry, I did some work on a predictive dialer system. One of the more amusing bugs (thankfully we spotted it before the code was released) was this:

1. The dialer software would run through a database table of 'prospects' and dial each one.
2. If the software was configured to add a prefix for an outside line, it would add this before dialing.
3. If the call wasn't answered, the number would get put in a different table in the database (subject to expiry time, number of attempts, etc.). This would include the prefix.
4. The call would later be retried from the second table, and the prefix would be added again. If it failed again, back it went, including the (now doubled) prefix.

When you consider that most offices in the UK use '9' for an outside line prefix, we were lucky to notice while it was still on our test system, otherwise we'd have been generating about 5000 calls/hour to the emergency services...

999 being the emergency service number? That seems like it'd get a lot of false calls from kids, cats, etc.

Might be a holdover from the days of rotary dialling, where the nine would be the number requiring the full turn of the dial, or almost full turn, depending on where the 0 is placed - first or last.

Here in Sweden we used 90000 (now switched over to Euro standard 112), with the 9 requiring the full turn and the 0s for speed (as it was placed first on the dial).

/Michael

999 being the emergency service number?

Yeah. Although you can dial the European-style 112 number now, too, I think.

Ah. In the US, we didn't have special numbers until well after touch-tone had taken hold.

Homer: Operator, give me the number for 911!

http://www.fire.org.uk/advice/999history.htm

Ooh. We've actually had clients DO this..

They call up, confused because they got a bill from the local 911 provider for making 1000+ calls to 911.

(Seems that the manager who set up their system was under the impression that they had to hit '9' to get an outside line. Like their PBX. Add that to the 1 country code, and mis-loading a WHOLE BUNCH of exchanges gave them a calling list of 32k+ "911..." numbers.) Oops. It actually did cause us to implement a small check. if the first three digits (even for, say, a valid number) turns out to be 911, then dump the number...

Me.

They call up, confused because they got a bill from the local 911 provider for making 1000+ calls to 911.

You have to pay to call emergency services?! Or only if it's a mistake?

Only if it is a mistake. In this case, since it was an autodialer business doing it, I am guessing it was more of a fine than a useage bill.

FWIW, even lines that don't have active service can call 911.

Only if it is a mistake. In this case, since it was an autodialer business doing it, I am guessing it was more of a fine than a useage bill.

Yeah, sorry if I gave the other impression. They got fined since they effectively locked up the 911 call center for 10+ minutes. It was a fine per call since none of the calls were actual emergencies. (I am unclear as to the exact nature of the bill, unfortunately.)

I will add that we once had a dialer shut down an entire town, too. Somewhere out in mid-Texas (US), a company started up with 4 T1s (24 lines each). they hired all the local kids from the area, and trained them. The first day they went live, the activity from the predictive dialer sucked all the computing power away from the other lines in the town, so other businesses/residential phones were inactive. (i.e. Pick it up, no dial tone. Or dial tone after 10 seconds.) They were told to shut down until the local carrier could upgrade the town's CO so it could handle all the traffic. Took 'em a year. Quite amusing on our side, as we (in tech support) made our company's first slogan: "Predictive Dialers - Your town doesn't need those phones!".

Me