Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Welcome to On Call, and a telephone mystery solved only after an innocent party found themselves on the receiving end of a most unexpected conversation. Our story, from a reader Regomised as "Des", takes place in the closing years of the 20th century and concerns an IVR platform he'd developed. IVR, or Interactive Voice …

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

At a former firm, I once part-wrote an IVR that routed callers to operators in a (necessarily) complicated way.

Due to a bug present at launch some callers were mistakenly forwarded to the emergency services because one part of the system used 999 as an undocumented error code. Oops.

[anthonyhegedus]

I once worked for an American company (in London) who rejected a proposal to have a DDI block where the 7-digit numbers all began with 666, on the grounds that a) some Americans might be scared to call them and b) some Americans might decide to sue, on the grounds that the company in question is somehow in league with Rex Inferioris himself.

Then we had an American guy in the office saying we shouldn't be allowed to have some London numbers be of the format 911-xxxx because it might confuse any visiting Americans who might just want to call them and hesitate in case they get through to the Feds.

[Dr Paul Taylor]

555

I used to have a phone number beginning 555 (Stratford, London E15). Americans wouldn't believe it was genuine. (Because they reserve 555 for helplines and TV shows.)

For a while I was getting "adult" calls, though most of them cut off when they heard a male voice. Eventually I persuaded one to explain where he'd got my number. It was in the Daily Star "newspaper", listed as "Mature Edin". So the callers were so dim that they were calling the wrong city. I did manage to get is stopped, but I forget how.

[spireite]

Re: 555

For years, I used to think that the city that 555 was allocated to in shows was the US version of Midsomer

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: 555

It was usually "KLondike" (for obvious reasons if you know where K and L are on the phone).

[JimboSmith]

Re: 555

I met a lady years ago who worked for a company who did a live adult phone service. The company forwarded calls on to her second phone number at home and cut them off after their paid time was up. She said the majority of the callers were foreign, were paying obscene amounts and had interesting or obscene taste. She had a headset for her phone and watched This Morning with Richard and Judy with the subtitles on whilst 'working'. She did very well out of it financially she said.

[jake]

Re: 555

555 was never assigned to helplines or TV shows in the US. In actual fact, the 555 prefix is left unassigned, somewhat similar to "example.com". Dialing a number with this prefix usually returns "This number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again."

"I did manage to get is stopped"

Should have made it a Premium Number that provided a recording with information about the proper prefix for those who wanted the teenage boy bait[0] line.

[0] In both senses of the word ...

[Stevie]

Re: the 555 prefix is left unassigned

So how does 555 1212 work?

[jake]

Re: the 555 prefix is left unassigned

"So how does 555 1212 work?"

Exactly as it is programmed to work, of course!

More seriously, as I said, "somewhat similar to", and "usually returns'. That number (directory assistance) is one of the exceptions to the rule. There are (were?) a couple others, some public and some only usable internally to $TELCO.

[Not Yb]

Re: the 555 prefix is left unassigned

The number of (US) companies who don't check for 555 or 1212 phone numbers on "phone number required" web forms is quite high. Quite a few think mine is 555-1212.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: the 555 prefix is left unassigned

'Whitehall 1212' was the number for Scotland Yard(*), so is 555-1212 for the FBI?

(it's now 'Abbey 1212', 'cos 222-1212 is easier to remember than 944-1212)

[G7mzh]

Re: 555

When multi-user chatlines first came out, one of the proposed adverts used a "dummy" number instead of whatever the actual one would be. Unfortunately the number chosen happened to that of a private subscriber, who was forced to have their calls intercepted by the operator.

The number was picked because it had several repeated digits and fitted well with the jingle. Apparently it didn't occur to anyone to actually check if it existed!

[Aussie Doc]

Re: 555

Ah, obviously not 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3 then.

A lot of thought went into that one, I'm sure.

[jake]

While there might still be a few backwards folks here in the USA who would have an aversion to dialing 666, I hardly think that any of them would be smart enough to have a job that would require business trips abroad. Except government officials, of course ... and they have flunkies to make calls for them.

Note that dialing 911 does NOT connect you to "The Feds" (whatever that is!), rather it connects you directly to the locally managed emergency switchboard, so they can direct your call to local people who understand local conditions (the US being a fairly large place, it does little good to manage (for example) wildfires in the North Bay Area in California from an office building in Washington DC.)

With that said, I have seen similar aversions and confusions from British tourists here in California. There is nothing uglier than a newbie tourist with delusions of grandeur abroad, regardless of country of origin ... although some are worse than others. Some much worse.

[swm]

Someone in Rochester, NY, tried calling 911 because she had lost her car keys. An interesting conversation followed until it was realized that a Canadian 911 operator had gotten the call across Lake Ontario.

[DomDF]

I called 999 from Warwickshire and got through to Northamptonshire Police. Had to be redirected by the very helpful call handler, but it took about 10 minutes before I was speaking to the right force.

[anothercynic]

That's interesting. How far from the Northants-Warks border were you? I can imagine that either there was a stupid postcode thing going on (oh, those in postcode X actually are supposed to be Northants but aren't), or that some smart arse thought that the police force more likely to be able to respond quickly was Northants.

But... I can imagine this is somewhat disconcerting when you're dialling 999 and are told 'you're sure you dialled 999 and are from Warks?'

[jake]

"Someone in Rochester, NY, tried calling 911 because she had lost her car keys. An interesting conversation followed until it was realized that a Canadian 911 operator had gotten the call across Lake Ontario."

Knowing a little bit about international Voice tariffs and how the switching system works, I can't quite picture how that would happen.

Coordination of Emergency Services across the 5,524 mile (8,891km) US/Canada border is non-trivial, and it certainly isn't automated.

[Antron Argaiv]

Easy peasey - cell phone connected to a tower on the Canadian side. Therefore "911" gets routed to Canadian operator.

The "connected to a Canadian tower" thing happened to me once, when well inside the Vermont border. I got hit with extortionate roaming charges and immediately complained to my provider, who removed them. It's all smoke an mirrors (and profit).

[anothercynic]

And this is why the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are considered 'home turf' for the operators of the UK and the Republic in a nice cross-border arrangement. Kent occasionally has a moment when the bits closest to France sometimes find themselves with a roaming text message 'Welcome to France!' despite sitting in their conservatory or their front room.

And of course, this is where the EC has done the right thing to enforce a single cross-border tariff agreement for mobile roaming, which we are regrettably no longer a part of. There are some moments where a certain Spanish operator does not consider Switzerland to be part of the EU (rightly so, they're not) and thus excludes the country from its EU roaming plan, causing much agony to those who flew into Basel and who oscillated between French (yay), German (yay) and Swiss (boo!) cell towers...

[Shez]

I picked up Republic of Ireland towers from North Wales one time staying at a campsite on the Llyn peninsula.

I contacted my network provider, Orange at the time, a lady with an american accent on their customer support line failed to help, repeatedly telling me I needed to switch off roaming when abroad, I repeatedly pointed out Wales isn't abroad but she was having none of it, I was naming a different country to England and therefore was abroad and the charges stood.

[NITS]

666 is (and has been for decades) a local exchange in Cockeysville, MD, a northern suburb of Baltimore.

[stiine]

There's also an exchange in Mobile, AL's west suburb with a 666 exchange, and there are several christian churches with (used to be) +1-205-666-xxxx numbers.

[Brad Ackerman]

666-HWHY gets you the St. Judas Church of Holy Tribulation and Tax Evasion.

[Shez]

I misread that at first and thought it was going to be Highway to Hell related.

[Antron Argaiv]

CSB: When living in university housing, the student phones were on a Centrex system (basically, a small switch or a large PBX). Each room in the dorm had their own phone number, starting at the lowest numbered room and incrementing for each successive room. All student numbers started with 546- and the university office numbers were on the 545- exchange.

This being an older Centrex system, well before mandatory 10-digit dialling, you reached student numbers by dialling the last 5 digits, e.g.: 6-xxxx. I had the good (/) fortune to have 546-6666. The number of drunk-dialled calls on Friday and Saturday nights was astounding. We finally opened up the phone and removed the bell gongs, so we could still hear it ring, but could sleep through it. Gongs were replaced at the end of my time in that room, so the next resident could enjoy the full experience.

[Medical Cynic]

When I was a student, the only telephone was a payphone in a doorway open to the elements!

And it didn't accept incoming calls, so cost a fortune in coins.

[rjsmall]

Wrong number

After the change from 0171 and 0181 to 020 there was no longer a differentiation between inner and outer London for the purposes of area codes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Number_Change#Geographic_number_changes) There was also the addition of the 3 prefix for London phone numbers.

One of my very sad bugbears is companies still displaying their number as starting 0207, 0208 or 0203.

[Andy Taylor]

Re: Wrong number

The correct format is, of course, 020 xxxx xxxx

Down on the south coast, the traditional rivalry between Portsmouth and Southampton means that although they share an area code (Solent, 023), all Portsmouth numbers begin 023 9 and all Southampton ones 023 8.

A certain Southampton based telephony provider named after a Greek letter still lists the two locations separately in their number allocation tool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

My apologies for being pedantic, but as the recommendations leading up to the E.164 recommendations for phone number formatting are only something like four decades old they clearly haven't penetrated everywhere yet, leading to the presence of contact phone numbers on a website in only local format.

The correct format in this case would be +44 20 xxxx xxxx. Spaces will be ignored by systems but (as with credit card numbers) are recommended for human interfaces in both entry and presentation as it makes them easier to check (and to easier memorise via chunking for the few who still do this).

Now I can understand that whole tribes go through their lives without even acknowledging the presence of other countries, but it's good practice to always use correct international format.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Wrong number

However in terms of the UK the leading two digits after the country code and the first digit of the first block of four signify discrete geographical areas. My current phone number has the same first two leading digits as an old one - from nearly 200 miles away.

+44 xx xxxx xxxx might be an international standard but +44 xxx xxxxxx is apt to be more meaningful to users. But, hey, what do users count for in international standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

Where the spaces go is immaterial - you can place them wherever you feel like, with grouping them in blocks of four supporting the chunking approach to memorisation or grouping them based on geographic features.

What matters is the international format, in this case the "+44" and dropping the first "0".

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Wrong number

My phone doesn't have a +. I suppose I can't make international calls. The rest of the time, I dial 0 when apparently I mean +44. Or I dial 567890 when I want to talk to 01234 567890. (I made this number up, but it is like that.)

I mean my real phone. My cell phone does have a +. It is on the 0.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

Although mobile phones actually use the "+" as a dialling character, that was not the original designation.

The "+" is a placeholder for "whatever you needed to dial in the respective country to get an international circuit". I've been in countries where this was "09" and other places that used "00", and this stems from the days we still had dials that actually turned to generate number pulses and made numbers with a lot of zeros quite time consuming to dial :).

Mobile phones started using the "+" itself due to the fact that they are, well, mobile, and would thus need to adjust to changing national dialling environments. If you were to store a number with "00" for international access, it would fail the moment you would be in one that used "09" - using the "+" instead addresses that and keeps things simple.

This is also why, in an increasing international world, you want to state a phone number in full international format. That way, someone with a phone from another country or even being in another country can dial the number directly instead of having to edit it first.

[NATTtrash]

Re: Wrong number

Unless you dial an Italian number internationally...

Drop the zero there, and a nice, albeit automated Italian lady will satisfy all your Fish Called Wanda needs.

Without getting you to your original destination that is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Phone number formats

I'm in the US. I have two comments.

1. I have a old yard stick with advertising printed on it. I told my wife to never throw it out. It is OLD, the company phone numbers are 3 digits long.

2. One of my kids moved to Montana. The whole state has one area code. No big deal except were she works does memberships using the phone number. And they have customers from all over the US. But the locals mostly don't give their are code because it's always 406 and some are how dare you ask.

[jake]

Re: Phone number formats

I am also in the US ... The small community where my parents grew up has one of the last party line telephone systems in the United States. We decommissioned it "officially" in 1972. After disconnection, $TELCO left us the obsolete equipment to dispose of as we saw fit.

Unofficially, it still works between two dozenish homes, mostly family members. It is possible to call me there by dialing one of two numbers we maintain specifically for the purpose, and then having the operator (or a computer, on the second line) patch from $TELCO to our party line[0] and then ring the requested number.

In the other direction, four short rings automatically patches you to an outside line, normally used for emergencies only these days (thus the computer controlled line ... the human operator is an elderly cousin). Then you rattle the hook to tell the computer what number to dial. Yes, it's slow to dial out ... but it has saved lives on at least two occasions; cell phones don't work well or at all in this part of the Mendocino County back woods.

Mostly it's used for birthdays, anniversarys and other family stuff like that. My "number" (inherited from my Grandfather) is two shorts & two longs.

[0] Don't panic ... it's legal, I built a couple optically isolated circuits specifically for the purpose.

[swm]

Re: Phone number formats

At a high school in Vermont phone numbers were like 686M or 144M4. There were operators who answered, "Number Please," and would correct you if the number was wrong.

[kiwimuso]

Re: Phone number formats

@swm

When I grew up in a small town in New Zealand, the local exchange was all operator driven. Think 60's.

However we were on a party line shared with 2 or 3 neighbours.

This was in the days of a hand-cranked "dial", pre-actual dials. If you wanted to call the neighbour we had to use the handle to do Morse code with. So if the suffix was an S we had to attempt 3 short rings.

Finally my father managed to wangle a single number for ourselves to cater for home and business, which also was a 2 premises party line. It was easy to remember too as it was a 1/4 mile in yards (pre-decimal) so, 440.

I can't remember the suffixes but I think "home" was 440-S and his office was 440-S thus we could answer either phone from home or office.

Oh, and when I worked in Texas for a couple of years, I got used to the U.S. method of numbering, so all my phone numbers are stored in my phone with the international prefix (+) and country code.

And it still pisses me off when websites will not accept formatted phone numbers and insist on no spaces or special characters. I ask them why their web developers were not capable of parsing a simple phone number which I used to do in IBM Assembler fer chrissakes!!

[Andy A]

Re: Wrong number

Only yesterday, while trying to purchase something online, the website of Big Retailer refused to accept my mobile number, which I pasted in replete with "+44".

It is over 30 years since I put the country code in all my mobile phone entries. How come these people have never come across this concept?

Then they moved on to deny my debit card until I removed the "20" from the expiry date year field, though my bank carefully embosses this into the plastic. Of course the web form provides plenty of space for four digits and the site only objects (cryptically) when you click "Proceed".

[JimboSmith]

Re: Wrong number

After the change from 0171 and 0181 to 020 there was no longer a differentiation between inner and outer London for the purposes of area codes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Number_Change#Geographic_number_changes) There was also the addition of the 3 prefix for London phone numbers.

One of my very sad bugbears is companies still displaying their number as starting 0207, 0208 or 0203.

Except that as my eldest nephew pointed out you have to dial the whole 11 digits on a mobile regardless of where you're calling in the UK. So it doesn't matter to the teenagers (and doubtless others) how you write it down as they don't have landlines.

[Anne Hunny Mouse]

Re: Wrong number

Some area codes you have to dial the full DDI even locally due to lack of numbers meaning 0,1 and 9 ranges can be used.

e.g. 01642 or +44 1642 (for E.164 people) is one of these and has 01642 0 numbers,

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

"Except that as my eldest nephew pointed out you have to dial the whole 11 digits on a mobile"

When was the last time anyone dialled (OK used the keypad) a phone number on a mobile? I also thought da kidz use stuff like whatsapp and facetime these days instead of grandad-era telephony.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Wrong number

Apparently you're mistaken, or the nephew is older than you are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

When was the last time anyone dialled (OK used the keypad) a phone number on a mobile? I also thought da kidz use stuff like whatsapp and facetime these days instead of grandad-era telephony.

You can't call businesses with WhatsApp or Facetime.

[Shez]

Re: Wrong number

No, but there are unfortunately an increasing amount of business that seem to expect you to contact them via Whatsapp or Facebook etc, particularly small local businesses - plumbers sparkies etc. I tried to book my dog into a daycare place and never heard back from them on the phone, I mentioned it to a friend whose dog goes there who suggested I should try to contact them on Instagram.

[JimboSmith]

Re: Wrong number

You're assuming that they have smartphones which have Facebork and WotsApp. They won't be getting one of those for a while apparently.

[jake]

Re: Wrong number

"When was the last time anyone dialled (OK used the keypad) a phone number on a mobile?"

I do, every single time I use it.

But then, I only use my cell to make and receive telephone calls. And sometimes to tell the time.

[What? Me worry?]

Re: Wrong number

"When was the last time anyone dialled (OK used the keypad) a phone number on a mobile?"

Today. :P

[DevOpsTimothyC]

Re: Wrong number

After the change from 0171 and 0181 to 020

I thought it never did.

Didn't the numbers go

01 -> 071 & 081 then 071 -> 0171 & 081 -> 0181 then 0171 -> 0207 & 0181 -> 0208.

If you have 0207, 0208 or 0203 can you dial one of the others without the 020 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

What about 01 811 8181

[Outski]

Re: Wrong number

Or 01 811 8055, for those of us who grew up with Swap Shop

[G7mzh]

Re: Wrong number

Or those of us who preferred the wireless to the television, 484 5255 (which was actually a high-capacity redirect to 388 1255) - as Cuddly Ken instructed us, "Just cram your finger in the dial"!

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Wrong number

Ah, the heady days of Kenny Everett on commercial radio (they gave him a bit more latitude than the BBC who fired him - twice), before he went completely bonkers on the telly. I still have the 194 Capital Radio tee shirt I won in one of his competitions in the '70s, although unfortunately it no longer fits!

Whilst his TV programs were funny, they went over the top as far as I was concerned.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

I was working in the PO Tower on the long distance incoming unit when Capital was launched (a stone's throw away) and we kept a radio tuned to Capital for work, not just for pleasure.

The 'work' bit was to listen out for the phone-in quizzes because it meant that we had a few minutes before we would have to go round sorting out alarms as the 'clockwork' seized up due to the sudden influx of simultaneous calls

Eventually someone invented a box that went in all the London and surrounding exchanges that limited the number of calls to their new 484 5255 number at a much earlier stage so that calls were flagged as 'busy' and didn't gridlock the network

(we never had that problem with the BBC, which was on the local patch... a phone-in for Gardener's Question Time is more laid back)

[Flightmode]

Re: Wrong number

Or 0118 999 881 999 119 725...3

[David 132]

Re: Wrong number

What, you still use the phone for that? Whatevs, grandad... email, surely?

> Subject: Fire

> Dear Sir/Madam,

> I am writing to inform you of a fire, which has broken out at the premises of...

[Potty Professor]

Re: Wrong number

When I was at College, 0203 was Coventry.

[Gerry 3]

Re: Wrong number

That's why London 3xxx xxx numbers were allocated when the legacy 7xxx xxxx and 8xxx xxxx numbers ran out. Seeing a London 020 x where x wasn't 7 or 8 would have confused some people into thinking it was an old pre PhONEday number and they would have mistakenly dialled 0120 x. Woe betide the unfortunate subscriber in the provinces who had the matching digits !

At PhONEday Coventry changed from 0203 to 024 76 numbers, so misdials to 01203 would have been trapped before they could cause any annoyance.

[ravenstar68]

Re: Wrong number

You're mixing PhONE day with the Big Number change

On PhONE day in 1995 a 1 was added to many dialing codes so Coventry moved from 0203 to 01203

On the Big number change in 2000, Coventry became 024 with existing numbers being prefixed with 76.

[Gerry 3]

Re: Wrong number

There's only one code for the London system and it's 020. Local numbers start with 3, 4, 7 and 8. The area code can be omitted when calling between 020 numbers.

[snowpages]

Re: Wrong number

I recently successfully dialled an 0208 xxx xxxx number just using the xxx xxxx - which is what you could do in the 01 xxx xxxx days and is one reason why people still format the last 7 digits the old way.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Wrong number

That's not an 0208 xxx xxxx, it's an 020(smashes space bar very hard)8xxx xxxx number.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong number

Not sure how you managed that

020 is the area code for London

XXXX was the exchange

YYYY was the customer's number

Even if you consider 'exchange' is an outdated concept (when they started using '3xxx' they threw away the concept of inner v outer and possibly even an exchange area), it is still a 8-digit number

[ravenstar68]

Re: Wrong number

No

All 02 codes are 3 digit codes with the phone - numbers becoming 8 digits. Existing numbers were then prefixed with numbers which is where the confusion comes about.

This also happened previously with the 011x dialing codes there are prople to this day who say the code for Reading is 01189 - it's not it's 0118

02 number ranges

020 London - exisiting numbers prefxed with a 7 or an 8

023 Southampton and Portsmouth (existing numbers prefixed with 80 or 92)

024 Coventry - Exisiting numbers prefixed with 76

029 Cardiff - Existing numbers prefixed with 20

028 Northern Ireland - Belfast numbers were prefixed with 90

I was a Telephone operator doing 100/999 for Cable and Wireless at the time of the Big Number change - it rankles me that 2 decades on people still say London is 0207 and 0208

[EnviableOne]

Re: Wrong number

I lived through the 01 081 0181 to 020 8 switches and it was a pain in the rear

most Londoners that still use a landline still believe the 7,8 or 3 are part of the area code and inter-dialling requires the full number when you can in fact just drop the 020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:History_of_London_STD_codes.svg

[adam 40]

Ahh the old audiotex days

It was one of those industries I worked in back in the 90's.

My company was taken over by a shady outfit called CommsCo or something like that.

A colleague called Dave was the tech looking after the shady phone lines. Apparently the receptionist at CommsCo got quite flustered when he had to record some new material with a couple of models. Some "girl on girl" we might say...

Anyhow, some time later, as "business was dropping off", the directors decided to have a BBQ in the machine room, and then claimed on the insurance for all the expensive kit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ahh the old audiotex days

Different kid of spit-roast obviously

[JimboSmith]

Re: Ahh the old audiotex days

A school friend of mine had been calling one of those shady numbers from home and running up quite a bill. His dad got the itemised bill and hit the roof as it had gone up exponentially. As this guy was an only child and the calls were after school, it was obviously him. His dad said he was going to call the number and see what this premium service was. If it was as his dad suspected it was, an adult number he'd be in serious trouble. After the call, my mate said his dad gave him a very funny look and told him not to call the number again. If he wanted to know what the weather was like he should open a window.

He came round to my house very puzzled as he was expecting a thick ear or three. So we dialled the number and got the Times [Newspaper] Weather Service not naughty Tina or whoever. They'd either taken over the number or the wrong tape was being played. Whatever had happened it saved his bacon.

[Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward]

Re: Ahh the old audiotex days

Maybe the line was fitted with a "Dad Detector" or something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my earliest hacks ...

Was to write a bit of code that used the Luhn algorithm to generate "valid" credit card numbers that allowed guys (invariably) to create accounts with 0898 chatline services. You'd have about 24 hours before they twigged. But I could create thousands.

[Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

The introduction of 0898 numbers caused a lot of issues in the TWeed exchange area (ie. Galashiels, etc) as the existing area code was 0896. Very easy to get the two confused with drunken fingers on a Friday and Saturday night.

Many of the locals were not amused at the quantity and nature of the calls they were starting to receive at late hours and it became a bit of a political issue to get BT to try and solve it. Their initial solution was of course to advise the householders to change their number, at their own cost!

[Potty Professor]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

In 1982 we bought a house. There was already a phone line installed, and we kept the same number. About six months later, the Borough Council installed an incoming only telephone at the head of the taxi rank in North Street. Its number was only one digit different from ours, so we kept getting calls from people asking for a taxi to take them home, to the pub, to the supermarket, etc, etc. We politely informed them that they had dialled the wrong number, and advised them of the correct number. One Christmas Day, when we were in bed at 3AM, a very drunk chap demanded a taxi to take him home. I sleepily repeated the usual script, and hung up. Two minutes later, same chap, still drunk, demanding a taxi again. Repeated information and hung up. Another two minutes, same chap, still pissed and now also pissed off, making death threats if I didn't come and rescue him. I hung up and went downstairs to unplug the line at the terminal socket, so he would get the unobtainable tone. Next working day, 27th or 28th probably, phoned the GPO and complained. They said that they would issue me with a new but similar number, so no more taxi calls. Bliss!

Strangely enough, I have recently moved to another house, also with existing phone line and number, but this one is only one digit away from the local pub, so kept getting bookings for tables for six, etc. Complained to BT, but this time, they changed the pub's number, not mine.

[Old Used Programmer]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

One place my family lived when I was a teenager had a number that was very close to a local auto repair shop. When my father answered, he would solemnly tell the caller that "Joe" had just stepped for a short beer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

In University, a guy down the hall had his room phone number end up being close to a professors office phone number in a newly opened building. He would answer and say things like "sure no problem turning in your paper late".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

I used to have a phone number that was one digit off from a local district court judge (back when I was a teenager). I finally got so tired of all of the calls, that I started "assisting" local lawyers with their cases. I would happily reschedule their trials, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

Had a phone that was the same as the local Chinese, but last two digits were transposed.

If I had to give out my number to some one I didn't want to, I'll "accidently" do t same

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

"this time, they changed the pub's number, not mine."

You'll still get calls from people who "know" the pub's number. Never mind, the wrong numbers still count on BT's bottom line.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

We used to get calls for a local garage. More recently it's been for a not quite so local safe supplier. I wondered if their letter-head had some not too legible script but they say no. I hope their customers have better luck with their combinations.

[Toc-H-Lamp]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

My sister was plagued with calls for a local, quite upmarket, restaurant after an ad appeared in the paper with the wrong number. For the first week she politely told them it was a wrong number and gave them the correct one having informed the restaurant of the mistake. When the same ad went in, with the same mistake the following week she merrily took bookings for tables for 10, all vegans etc. The number was corrected in the following week’s ad.

[Andy A]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

Famously, a department store ran an ad in a local newspaper promising phone calls with Santa Claus and was printed with an incorrect number.

The accidental recipient was the local US Air Force base. They ran with it.

This eventually morphed into to website where NORAD displays the progress of Santa's sleigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

I used to work in an office that had a phone in the quiet/rest area called 'the love line' that was invariably answered as 'Tartan Paint Co', 'Up and Down Lift Co' or something similar. One day it was answered 'Underground Airways' and the voice at the other end asked for a flight to Malaga!

At lunch time one of the guys passed the local travel agents, noticed their ATOL number, and figured out what had happened... the person had dialled the number, got 'engaged' then redialled but tagged on their ATOL number assuming it was an alternate number... sure enough it was listed in the local paper with the ATOL number right below the phone number.

[Aussie Doc]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

In a previous life/different century, my drum teacher's phone number was one digit off of Ansett Australia (popular airline) bookings desk.

Old Jack, for that was his name, was always very polite informing the callers of their error and most would apologise and that was that.

Except for when he got those arrogant folk who have the audacity to tell him that HIS number IS the correct one because they are very important and thus know better.

I don't think Jack kept tabs of how many folks thought they had been booked onto a non-existent flight.

I'm sure arguing with the folks at the counter would have been no fun.

Can't find a ticket, either. --->

[jake]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

That is not a hack. It's not even a crack.

Typical script kiddie, in fact.

[G7mzh]

Re: One of my earliest hacks ...

I used to know someone who could do this off the top of his head.

I've no idea how, as he was as think as two short planks otherwise!

[Flocke Kroes]

I expected a different problem...

I thought the story would be that some freeloader had bought and advertised their own premium rate numbers and had them forwarded to the 0208 numbers.

[phuzz]

Re: I expected a different problem...

Now that's devious!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, Des, it was you!

I'm pretty sure I was an unwitting victim of this snafu.

I lived in central London in '98 and for a while got a number of calls who were clearly not expecting my voice to answer.

I do remember it being due to an issue with premium-rate numbers being forwarded to the wrong inner/outer London code, but I forget how I found out.

All these years later, and good ol' El Reg finally gets to the bottom of the case!

[Anonymous Coward]

In the days before widespread caller ID we would occasionally call one of those chat lines, then call someone else (often the new summer intern) in the open plan office, and quickly conference them together. We'd then try to keep straight faces while listening to the resultant conversation. Some interns twigged quickly, but I remember one going a wonderful shade of pink, while trying to be polite to the "young lady" he thought had called him.

[Stuart Castle]

Posted this a couple of times now, but it's still funny (IMO) and valid here, so..

A few years ago, my then uncle was a programmer in a fairly big company (I forget which). As a prank, he came up with the idea of doing the above (calling a premium rate line and transferring the call to someone else). Now, the company had restrictions in place to prevent the phone system dialing premium rate lines.

Being a bit of a been hacker on the side, my uncle found a method to bypass the restrictions, do so, dialled the number then transferred the call.

It didn't go through. Basically because he bypassed the restrictions by taking advantage of a bug, the transfer did not complete, and the call got stuck in the system.. A few days later, the company discovered (thanks to a phone bill, IIRC, but I'm not in a position where I can check) the call. The bill for which was now well over £1,500.

They had to get an engineer in to get the system to terminate the call, and he discovered not only what my Uncle had done, but the fact my Uncle had done it, which left my Uncle with some awkward explanations and, I think, at least a written warning.

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

My info in this field is over a decade out of date, but the PhonePayPlus regulations - and before that OFCOM regulations - stipulated that the call must have a maximum price of £30.

That meant for a £1.50/minute call, the service had to auto-terminate at 20 minutes.

( Of course your story may pre-date my knowledge of the regulations, or may have involved a broken IVR. OFCOM and PPP don't play though so I can't imagine any IVR would stay broken in that way for long ).

[anthonyhegedus]

About 30 years ago I lived in London having a number beginning 892 (I think). I started getting weird calls like this:

"Do you do languages?"

"Do you do language tuition, you know?"

"What services do you offer apart from language?"

"Is that Tongue Services?"

and more of that ilk. Every time, the person would just hang up when I said I'm not sire what you mean. I had and still have no idea what those terms mean, but after a few days of this, I asked one of them "where did you get this number?" and they replied "In the Pink Paper". I think that used to be a homosexual interest newspaper (maybe it still is), but it turned out after a bit of digging that whoever advertised in the Pink Paper had the same number but with the first three digits 829 instead of 892.

I called the advertiser in question and they were most apologetic and corrected their advert in later editions, but that didn't stop the weird calls coming in. I had to ring BT in the end and ask them to change my number. The lady at BT said they don't do that free of charge. I explained "But I keep getting weird calls asking for Tongue Services" and the BT said "eugh! Well in that case we'll change it for free". And they did.

[Allan George Dyer]

I thought the Pink Paper was the Financial Times, there's obviously a lot I don't know about economics.

[John Brown (no body)]

Dad used to send me to the local paper shop for "the pink" or "the green" some weekends. Both were sports newspapers, one mainly football the other mainly racing IIRC.

[Norman Nescio]

Re: sporting newspapers on tinted newsprint

The Pink 'Un

Green 'Un

[jake]

Re: sporting newspapers on tinted newsprint

Just to confuse things further, the San Francisco Chronicle's sports pages are called "The Sporting Green" and are printed on green tinged newsprint ... except very occasionally, when the SF Giants baseball team are a major sporting headline, in which case it can be printed on orange(ish) newsprint[0]. Likewise, the Sunday Arts and Entertainment section is printed on pink(ish) newsprint.

Gimmick? Absolutely. But it sells newspapers.

[0] Has happened twice that I can remember: After the 2010 World Series[1] win, and more recently, when catcher Buster Posey retired.

[1] The name "World Series" is just a traditional name left over from advertising hype of well over a century ago. The only people who believe that Yanks and Canucks think of it as truly a "World" series are folks from countries where American baseball isn't played.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: sporting newspapers on tinted newsprint

It was the 'World Series' because it was started by the New York World

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: sporting newspapers on tinted newsprint

Interesting, but I'm neither old enough nor live far enough south to have seen either of those.

IIRC, the ones I'm thinking of were printed at the local printing press by the local newspaper, on very cheap paper late on a Saturday afternoon and delivered to the local newsagents not long before 6'O'clock closing time, just in time to get most of the days results in, the ink barely dried!. It was the (sports) internet of the day, about as up to date as was possible. From what I remember of them, they were syndicated and localised, being printed locally. The Sunderland editions would be different to the Newcastle editions in their local content, both coming from different print works.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of them are by accident

Long ago we started a small company, and for some reason we were joined by a character who I can only describe as shady.

If I recall correctly, there are two premium rates. The one that is used for contacting heavy breathing people has a rate that ought to make the caller pant just as much, but there's also one that is less blisteringly painful, I think it's 877 or something.

This guy used that slightly less painful rate number as his contact number on CVs and business cards because in those days it wasn't that clear it was more expensive (the advance warnings showed up years later). He didn't make much with it but he was a nickel-and-dimer anyway so every penny he made was gain in his eyes.

Anyway, this relation ended soon. The guy was simply borderline criminal, and in the end he tried to stick his hands in the till. Unfortunately for him I had his number by that time, if you pardon the pun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not all of them are by accident

When I retire, I'm going to get a premium rate number with the highest allowable rate. So that I never have to talk on the phone again.

[Anonymous Coward]

back in the day

Mid/late 80's . I was working with a public body/nationalised industry, replacing their ageing strowger pabx's with digital boxes. On the Strowgers not many people had "level 9" access (for direct dialled outside lines) which created quite a workload as legitimate calls from everyone else had to go through our own operator(s) to be dialled and connected manually.

The bills for the outside lines were all itemised (by BT and Mercury) , but on the strowgers there was no way of attributing those to individual extensions. It was also very difficult (aka neigh on impossible) to block any particular outside number from those who did have legitimate level 9 access. Some of the numbers called and costs were quite eye opening as the fledgling premium rate service industry was going through quite an exponential growth. I think the most popular numbers of all were horse racing and bookie numbers run by some of the national newspapers..... I seem to recall the single most expensive call we logged was around £120, which was about an annual bills worth for most people back then.

So, on the new digital pbx's we were running call logging software on all extensions, and gave level-9 to a whole load of new extensions, letting them know that calls were being logged. (which saved a lot of operator workload and thus quicker response) We of course put blocks on all the dodgy 0898 and similar numbers, but we could now see who was attempting to call them. The folks who now had level 9 access for the first time were generally very responsible, but some of the existing level-9 holders.... Well, It was rather eye opening as we could bypass the block and hear what some individual senior managers had been calling during working hours. Oh dear - you would probably not want to share the lavatory with them afterwards.

Of course, installing the new PBX's was a weekend job, and normally a Saturday night one as the organisation was effectively 24/7, which meant we had to test all the various levels of blocks to make sure they all worked from all classes of extension, which occasionally required entering the wood panelled offices of the bigwigs and making calls from their phones to dodgy numbers with and without the blocks in place. Some of the bigwigs had "mini pbx's" with manager/secretary and conference facilities that ran outside of the PBX often with unusual setups so not always easy to simulate by jumping in on the krone frame.

One of the other interesting aspects was that all extensions could make 999 calls, but would normally get rerouted to our own operator so that they were aware of the emergency and could co-ordinate things properly rather than an individual person calling the public emergency operator from our switchboard number which would not have given a very accurate user location. Only if our own operator could not answer would the call go through direct to the external 999 service. 999 calls would take priority over other calls in progress (ie someone would get dumped if all lines were busy) Which all had to be thoroughly tested. Turns out that at 4am on a boring sunday morning in some small provincial towns the 999 operators are rather welcoming of friendly calls from telephone engineers and enjoy a quick chat about things as we place multiple calls at the same time to try and make things fall over.

Happy days and a great learning experience for a student.

[David 132]

Re: back in the day

you would probably not want to share the lavatory with them afterwards.

Did it... happen often in that company... that people would share lavatories?

I mean, I remember myself in the early 80s having to endure TP that had the texture and absorbancy of greaseproof baking paper, but even back then in those coal-fired, benighted days, we got a lavatory to ourselves...

[jake]

Re: back in the day

"Did it... happen often in that company... that people would share lavatories?"

Well, consider that the lavatory is the place where you wash up, yes. I'm sure they do share a sink.

"in the early 80s having to endure TP that had the texture and absorbancy of greaseproof baking paper"

Back in our day, it were made of machine-shop waste and came pre-soaked in dung. '80s kids had no idea how good they had it.

[Flightmode]

I'm frankly disappointed that noone's mentioned the The Simpsons episode A Tale of Two Springfields in this thread yet.

[aerogems]

Forget that

What about the IT Crowd's emergency services commercial?

https://youtu.be/HWc3WY3fuZU

[Bill Gray]

Got caught by this...

Circa mid-90s, I started my (one-person) company, Project Pluto, with the (now long discontinued) US toll-free number 1 (800) PR-PLUTO.

A few months later, my mother was going up and down in the world and to and fro in it, and wanted to call me from someone else's phone. So she called 1 (800) PRO-PLUTO. The telephone system silently dropped the trailing 'O'.

My mother gets a breathy voice explaining the delights awaiting her, inviting her to press 1 and have a credit card ready.

Easily enough explained when she next saw me, but she did briefly wonder if I'd changed my business model from writing software for astronomers to... ah... discussions involving "heavenly bodies" of a different sort.

[jake]

Options are good.

Back when I was working on the 4.xBSDs and lecturing quite a bit on the subject (roughly the 1980s), I was warned by a veteran professor that a bunch of the Freshman kids would probably be dropping their telephones in October after running up huge bills in September ... so I should ensure that they all knew how to use email as a primary form of contact. This telephone "problem" had been happening for a couple years, it seemed, and was becoming worse as time went on.

Thinking about it for a couple seconds, I told him I'd get right on it ... but instead of just teaching an email module, I also went into the intricacies of the by now fast becoming obsolete UUCP ... including an overview of Usenet.

Strangely, that October was the last time for the mass drop-off in student owned telephones at Stanford and Berkeley. I wonder why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Options are good.

That would be alt.sex.with.dogs or comp.lang.pl1 which I'm probably not remembering correctly (but not from either Stanford or Berkeley as neither my gpa nor wallet would have allowed it).

[jake]

Re: Options are good.

Back then it was more like net.lang.c ... I honestly can't remember what the "stealth" bunny groups were called. The Great Renaming was still a couple years in the future, but the kids had figured out how to "hide"[0] UUencoded binary copyright violations in unused groups with unassuming names.

Most of the kids in the Engineering school at Berkeley were on the .gov's dime. So were quite a few at Stanford. They did have the GPAs, though ...

[0] Or so they thought.

[Swarthy]

Re: Options are good.

Wait - are you claiming to have started the Eternal September?

[jake]

Re: Options are good.

"Wait - are you claiming to have started the Eternal September?"

Not at all. This was eight or ten years before that ... We made damn sure the kids were properly socialized to Usenet before giving them posting privileges. Would you let an unwashed puppy swim in YOUR pool?

As a side note, everybody blames AOL for the Eternal September ... in reality, Delphi fired the first warning shot of that particular war about a year and a half earlier.

[Brian 39]

On call now....

I am a British ex-pat and have lived in the USA for 21 years and am now in the last six weeks before I retire from being on Technical Support/System Admin at a medium size American University.

It's 9pm Xmas eve here and I cannot confess to have diverted the redirect from our MS-Teams phone line support system to a porn line, but the prospect does intrigue me. Note I said I cannot confess to such a prank. Tee Hee.

And yes, despite today being a holiday and nobody is at work, today we had a db server run out of space (db team took care of it, but we had several email exchanges) and one of our senior staff has asked for the umpteenth time if our Zabbix monitoring server system was going to be hit by a Java Log4j Vuln. It won't as it doesn't use Java but we are not sending him the link from the product web site about this, as we want him to grow another ulcer.

Suggestions for last day pranks of this nature are more than welcome... Come on guys... Tell me what might be a fun thing to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: On call now....

Rickroll the hold music?

:)

Enjoy your retirement!

[stiine]

Re: On call now....

set your manager's mtu to 127 bytes.

[arachnoid2]

Re: On call now....

Have a lottery.........every call gets through to a random number

[Rattus]

oh the veritable 'HiCall'

Yep - "Des'" tale is unfortunately not the only time such a routing blunder has happened...

I used to "work in post design support" roughly translated as the bridge between customer support and development teams (I got all the jobs that customer support couldn't handle, or where the customer had to be handled with extreme care). On more than one occasion I was dispatched to resolve problems where there was no fault on the customer kit, but things had stopped working because someone had 'misconfigured' routing tables deep within the telco network.

This was all on switched circuit telephony (both channel associated and common channel signalling) way before the days of migrating to packet switched networks "21CN" the start of voice over IP.

0898 calls ending up on the wrong number at least meant that someone "within" the telco network had dropped the ball. With BGP, today, you can screw with other people's networks as well....

[Coastal cutie]

Ah, Angry of Angmering - first cousin to Riled of Rustington, Grouchy of Goring and Fed Up of Ferring

[jake]

What, no mention of ElReg's very own Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells?

[Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells]

I am beyond outraged.

[IGotOut]

I thought I knew who this was...

Then noticed the London part.

One of our branches had an almost identical number to an adult film company (last two digits flipped).

Never noticed until marketing published it in a load of glossy brochures...

Still not as bad as the time the really screwed up and sent out 10,000 brochures with another similar number to one of ours, Barclaycards lost card number.

The marketing droids genius response "Do you think we can get them to divert their number to us?"

[MrNigel]

BT Digital Derived Services Network - useless facts

As the Bids and Contracts manager at AT&T Phillips Telecommunications UK Ltd responsible for the engineering of the mid-80s BT DDSN and Mondial DISC I can confirm that BT did not include Adult Chat Lines in their revenue projections. The core 5ESS-PRX software was based entirely on the Bell standard 5ESS switches widely used in the USA. What Phillips did was develop the CCITT standard signalling so we didn't need to use T1-E1 converters (although we did install them on the Baynard House trainer which was brought into service to counter the Mercury DMS100 based Centrex service aimed at City of London financial institutions). A small Yorkshire based telecoms company developed the TV online voting service after seeing it in action in the USA and got a revenue percentage for every vote.

One of the biggest issues was the Childline 0800 1111 non-standard number format, there were no other 4 digit numbers on the network so the guys wrote a bit of code that did early routing to the PSTN breakout number when 1111 was detected. The first node was went live in Baynard House and the capital cost was recovered in 12 weeks thanks to £5/min no billing cap Premium Rate lines.

USELESS FACTS:

1. The DDSN remote maintenance computer was the first equipment installed in the underground bunker at the BT Oswestry NNCC.

2. I learnt about the Challenger disaster from the BT Clerk of Works who came rushing into our weekly progress meeting to inform everyone

3. I had lunch with that Bryan Carsberg

4. I arranged entertainment for 'a BT exec' at an Atlanta telecoms conference after the contract was signed

5. The Saudi Arabia MOPTT were responsible for the development of the 5ESS-PRX switch because they forced Phillips to find an alternative to their failed PRX-D offering

6. The switches supported three flavours of CCITT #7 signalling - C7, C7-International and C7-BT

7. My BT counterparts came to my wedding

Happy 2022 folks!

[EmleyMoor]

Muddled phone numbers

Many years ago, a factory had new letterheads printed, bearing the telephone number WED 1560. The problem was, this was actually my mum's number and the factory's was WED 1650. Cue lots of calls asking for people at the factory. The letterheads were reprinted - at some expense especially as the number would soon change to 556 1650.