Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!oberon!bbn!mit-eddie!killer!vector!nobody From: roy@phri (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Victims of Wrong Numbers Message-ID: Date: 26 Jan 89 14:26:21 GMT Sender: chip@vector.UUCP Lines: 81 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 32, message 1 My old 2nd line (i.e. modem) number used to differ by a transposition (or some other small difference) from the financial aid office at New York City Technical College. This was no problem until they sent out a memo one September to all their students with a typo on it. Lots of wrong numbers all of a sudden. We eventually got somebody who was patient enough to help us work out what happened ("where did you get this number", "it's on the memo", "what memo?", "the memo I got in the mail", "would you please be so kind as to read it to me", "...", "are you sure that's the number that's written on the paper?", etc). Anyway, we called the financial aid office and complained. It was amazingly difficult to make them understand what had happened: Me: Hi, you don't know me, but you sent out a memo telling people to call your office and gave my number by mistake. Them: What's your number? Me: xxx-xxxx Them: No, that's not our number, there must be some mistake. Me: Yes, that's the point, you told people to call my number. Them: No, I'm sorry, that's impossible, and we [getting a bit rude here] really can't be responsible for people dialing a wrong number. Me: Can you please go into your file cabinet and pull out a copy of the memo and read it to me? Them: I don't have a copy of it here, maybe you better talk to ..... Eventually, I finally got some higher-up administrator to actually go find a copy of the memo and read it out loud to me, taking her to task when she read past the phone number, unconcously saying the correct number for the financial aid office. Long pause. "Oh, we made a mistake". No shit, sherlock. I eventually convinced her that it would be in both our best interests' if she would send out a memo correcting the mistake: "Dear student, please note that the phone number for the financial aid office is xxx-xxxx, not yyy-yyyy as stated in the last letter. She did so. Of course, next semester, some grunt took the memo out of the file cabinet, xeroxed 100 million of them, and sent them out to all the students again. I'll leave it up to you to guess if they bothered to correct the phone number before they did so. Eventually we took to leaving the modem on all the time. Not really very nice, but what could I do? I would imagine I would be pretty frantic if I got a memo saying "unless you call this office before next Friday, you'll loose out on your financial aid" and every time I called the number, got sombody screaching at me. Could you imagine if you had a cellular phone and paid for incomming calls and this happened? The kicker to the story is a little while after we took to modemizing people, we read in the paper that some crazy person had walked into the financial aid office and started shooting at random, killing several people. Could it be that he was just frustrated by getting a modem whistle at him whenever he called about his aid package? I hope not. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network" [Moderator's Note: I had the identical experience in 1972. At the time, my 'second line' was actually my direct line. I lived in an apartment building with a front desk/manual switchboard. I had a two line 'turn button phone' with the switchboard line on one side and my private number HYde Park 3-3714 on the other side of the button. The Draper & Kramer Real Estate Company sent out a memo to all tenants in a huge (500 units) highrise building telling them how to reach the building engineer for maintainence requests, etc. Guess whose number was given in error when some digits were transposed. I fought with those people for a year! I finally had success only by being *rude* to the callers; to wit if they complained of no heat or no hot water I would cheerfully 'put them on hold' for a minute and come back on the line to advise them according to my records, 'the rent you are paying does not include heat or hot water'. After D&K got an earful from angry tenants complaining about '...that rude janitor you have working in the Fifteen-Fifty-Five Building' they decided to issue a new memo. I called it my own version of 'gorilla' (guerilla) warfare! PT]