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From: radius!lemke@apple.com (Steve Lemke)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Leaving Brief Messages With Free Collect Calls
Message-ID: <11395@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 27 Aug 90 01:19:01 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 599, Message 5 of 10


albert@endor.harvard.edu (David Albert) writes:

}v116kznd@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu wrote:

}>I used to call home collect, and my parents would refuse the charge, and
}>call me right back.

}In our family, accepted practice when I was in college was to call
}person-to-person for one's self.

As Pat pointed out, this is a sort of petty fraud, as you are actually
taking an operator's time to relay this message.  And, although I
suppose that the method my father and I used could also be labeled as
petty fraud since we also got a message through, I don't feel as bad
about using it.

Basically, our arrangement was this: If I wanted my dad to call me, I
would call his house and let the phone ring only once (and then hang
up).  He would therefore wait until a second ring before ever
answering the phone.  We have done this for almost ten years now, and
it works like a champ.  Considering the amount of money he has spent
on the phone talking to me on these return calls (and the other calls
that he made without my prompting), we certainly don't feel bad about
using this method of "call request".  

And, occassionally, he would call me and say "did you 'one-ring' me?"
to which I might say "no, actually I didn't".  The cause: someone else
had called him, probably realized they had a wrong number, and hung up
after one ring.  Of course, this also didn't work if I wasn't at home,
unless he knew in advance that I was somewhere else (like if I was out
of town and he knew where I was).

I'm guessing that Pat will liken this to the "toll-saver" feature of
an answering machine in that a message is being conveyed (long time
Telecom readers will remember this other discussion from some time
ago).  However, I still claim that the hundreds of dollars they made
from all of my dad's return calls more than offset whatever it cost
them to let me one-ring him, and besides, we weren't using an operator
to relay the message.


Steve Lemke, Engineering Quality Assurance, Radius Inc., San Jose 
Reply to: lemke@radius.com     (Note: NEW domain-style address!!) 


[Moderator's Note: Yes, it is similar to the toll-saver technique, and
I guess since AT&T now includes that feature on their own answering
machines they must have decided if you can't do anything about it, you
might as well make some profit from it yourself.   PAT]