"Robert M. Hamer" <HAMER524@ruby.vcu.edu> (04/30/91)
I recently stayed in the Omni Newport News (in Newport News, VA) while doing four days of cousulting there. (It is a very nice hotel. I like Omnis.) While there, I wanted to call my wife, who is currently staying in a Residence Inn, outside of Princeton, NJ. (Try selling a house in Virginia, buying in New Jersey, all the while when both of us travel on business, and her "home" since December has been a Residence Inn.) That Residence Inn is in area code 908, recently split off from 201, still reachable via permissive dialing through area code 201. I dialed 908-xxx-xxxx, and got an ITT-Metromedia operator, who told me that I couldn't dial that number from wherever I was (and he really didn't know where I was, either.) I tried it again, and got the same result. I called the hotel operator and front desk, who assured me that I should just be able to dial the phone number and everything should work automatically as it usually does in a hotel. I tried it again and got the same result. At that point I thought, "Ah, ha! Perhaps some table either in the hotel's PBX doesn't know about area code 908, or some table at ITT-Metromedia (who obviously handles the hotel's long distance) doesn't know about 908, so I dialed the call as a201-xxx-xxxx. Bingo. It worked. I wrote a letter to the manager, dropped it off at the front desk. I stayed there three more days, and never heard from the manager. I wonder if he/she tossed the letter in the wastebasket. However, this is another instance where I feel sorry for the poor everyday consumer who barely knows that there are multiple long distance companies, has no idea that 10xxx codes are available, and has no idea that area codes have been split, ever. I doubt that it would have occurred to me that the area code table might be wrong had I not been some sort of telecom phreak. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
abh@pogo.camelot.cs.cmu.edu (Andrew Hastings) (05/02/91)
In article <telecom11.320.11@eecs.nwu.edu> HAMER524@ruby.vcu.edu (Robert M. Hamer) writes: > I doubt that it > would have occurred to me that the area code table might be wrong had > I not been some sort of telecom phreak. Has anyone else had a similar > experience? I stayed at Hyatt Rickys in Palo Alto about five years ago, shortly after Stanford University's numbers moved from 497-xxxx to 723-xxxx. I tried dialing a number at Stanford (a local call) from my hotel room, and got an intercept from the hotel PBX claiming that the number was invalid. I dialed the hotel operator, explained what had happened, and she put the call through after promising to update the PBX database. Andrew Hastings abh@cs.cmu.edu 412/268-8734