Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!texsun!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: nsc!woolsey@decwrl.dec.com (Jeff Woolsey) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Overseas Collect Calls Message-ID: Date: 24 Jun 89 01:15:05 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: Jeff Woolsey Organization: National Semiconductor, Santa Clara Lines: 28 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 212, message 2 of 8 In article jeff@dsndata.uucp (Jeff Minnig) writes: > Heard an amusing story from an employee of my regular fill'er up > gas station the other day. > If you try to call a pay phone collect from a phone here in > the U.S., the operator knows that you shouldn't be doing that. > Is is possible to call a pay phone collect from overseas in > this manner? It seems to be a common practice here for the gas station to have a coin telephone on its line. It's a regular coin line, in that local calls require a coin deposit, but it is also listed in the directory as the phone number for that gas station. The bulk of the telephone usage at a gas station is either incoming calls for the business, or calls placed by customers waiting for work to be done. Some public telephone lines are set up to disable incoming calls, but this would not be a good idea in this application. Since it is a real business line, the owner might actually want to accept collect calls when answering the phone, so it is a little presumptuous of the operator to make this determination beforehand. -- Qualify nearly everything. Jeff Woolsey woolsey@nsc.NSC.COM +1 408 721-8162