Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: Ken Levitt Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Thurbing (Was: 800 Wrong Numbers) Message-ID: <2612@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 4 Jan 90 16:26:34 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 52 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 7, message 2 of 10 In Telecom V10 #4 Roy Smith writes: "Shame on you" {for misleading people who dialed a wrong number} I think it depends on the situation and the type of business involved. We all must take responsibility for our actions and live with the consequences. Anyone who dials a number at 3am better make sure they are dialing the correct number. If I wake up in the middle of the night it may take me an hour or two to get back to sleep. In this case no punishment is too severe for the the offending caller. (wouldn't Caller*ID be great?). Many years back there were only two exchanges in my town (653 and 655). One day we started getting a very large amount of wrong numbers on one of our two lines. It turned out that a catalog store had just opened that week and they had the 653 number that corresponded to out 655. I called the phone company and they said that we could pay to change our number which we had been using for 9 years. I then called the store manager who was very arrogant and told me I should change my phone number. I pointed out to him that we had this number for 9 years and he had his for one week. It would be a lot easier for him to change his number than for us to change ours. I also suggested that it would not be good for his business if callers ended up talking to an irate person on the phone. He seemed not to care. The people calling were interested in knowing about products for sale or orders that they had placed. These were not urgent items. For a while I did take some orders and told people that other orders had come in. The theory was that one of two things would happen. Either the store would get a lot of flack about this or people would stop doing business with them. After a while I got tired of this game and just left an answering machine on the line. I changed the message to something very generic so that it did not identify who had been reached. Some callers did seem irate that they has called sever times and had not been called back. The funniest message that was ever left was from an employee of the store who said that he would not be in that day. You would think that an employee would know that the store did not have an answering machine. The store finally went out of business after about two years and things have been mostly quiet since then. Ken Levitt - On FidoNet gateway node 1:16/390 UUCP: zorro9!levitt INTERNET: levitt%zorro9.uucp@talcott.harvard.edu