Path: utzoo!attcan!cmtl01!matrox!uvm-gen!uunet!lll-winken!ames!netsys!vector!nobody From: DLynn.ElSegundo@Xerox.COM Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Victims of Wrong Numbers Message-ID: Date: 24 Jan 89 18:33:43 GMT Sender: chip@vector.UUCP Lines: 35 Approved: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-Submissions-To: telecom@bu-cs.bu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 27, message 2 Your message brings back some old memories. When in college, I made the mistake of asking for "an easy-to-remember number". Pac Tel had a list of repetitive numbers that, for no extra charge, they would issue for those who asked. Essentially only businesses asked, and so nearly all the adjacent numbers were big businesses. I got so many wrong numbers that I kept a list by the phone of the most often called ones, and gave the correct number out to most wrong dialers. If I didn't, some callers would dial again and again. Some callers claimed the business card they were reading really said 8 where I knew it had to read 3, 6 or 9. Must have been really small type or smeared printing. I got a lot of calls where they dialled 8 instead of 7, too; must have been finger-aiming error. It was pretty funny one morning hearing an operator trying to get out of me why I would not accept a collect call; she had never had a business refuse to accept, and it didn't dawn on her that she had got the wrong number. I wasn't very coherent explaining this, since it was about 6 am, and I had been up studying most the night. The caller (from the east coast) didn't apparently believe in time zones. I think my roommate took a couple of orders from callers who wouldn't believe they had dialled wrong. Some poor devil is probably still waiting for his water cooler to be delivered. We never asked for our number to be changed. I don't know whether it was the thought of an unneccessary expense (no one offered to change it for free, but then we didn't complain much), or whether we were just too naive to know we were being bothered. That summer, my roommate stayed over the summer, and with essentially all school friends gone, he went for weeks at a time with wrong numbers only, none intended for him. He started answering every call with "I'm sorry you have dialled the wrong number." He was wrong only once. /Don Lynn DLynn.ElSegundo@Xerox.COM