Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Sat, 22 Jun 91 02:33:58 PDT From: Linc Madison Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Reusing Numbers After Just One Day Message-ID: Organization: University of California, Berkeley Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 478, Message 1 of 9 Lines: 37 In article David (gast@cs.ucla.edu) writes: > I called a friend of mine who lived in one of the dorms at UCLA last > school year the other night. I called on Sunday and the quarter ended > on Friday so I expected to get an intercept like "The number you > dialed is not in service ..." and I was hoping "the new number is ..." > Instead I got connected to new tenants. I am not sure if it was the > same room number, but it was the same dorm (I asked). It was almost certainly the same room number. In any situation where you have a Centrex or PBX for a college dormitory, the assignment of a number to a given line is almost etched in stone. Extension 1234 is and always has been and always will be Room 321 in Unit IV. In order to provide the intercept and such, they would have to reserve more than twice as many telephone numbers in a block. (All numbers in Berkeley prefixes 642 and 643 are reserved for the University of California. They would need to reserve at least two more prefixes to have intercepts.) That's because, when you move the entire student body off campus, or to new rooms for the new year, you would have to take half the numbers out of circulation. There just aren't enough numbers. Actually, I had a problem my senior year in college because of exactly the reverse situation: for no reason whatsoever, New Jersey Bell arbitrarily changed the number for the room I was moving into. Since I knew that the number was suppsed to be 4-0732, that's what I told my friends and family. Since the University knew that the number was supposed to be 4-0732, that's what they published in the student directory. It turns out that they swapped that line with 4-0372 (note the transposed digits), with the same effect on the people who were supposed to have *that* number. I have no idea how many calls I lost that year. Linc Madison = linc@tongue1.berkeley.edu = ucbvax!tongue1!linc