nathan@uunet.uu.net (Nathan Banks) (02/21/91)
Is there a concise list of criss-cross pubs, numbers, services available? When I was in college in SWB territory I would call the BO when the roomates could not recognise a long distance call. The BO would criss cross it for me, giving me a name and *sometimes* an address. When presenting this info to my roomates someone whould recognise the call and 'fess up and (*usually*) cough up the $. The only restriction was that I had to give her an item number on the bill and read the number to her. When she concurred with what I read with what was on her screen, the info came through. (I never tried exceeding the boundary conditions.) I grew up in Houston. I remember using the criss-crosses in the Houston Public Library - downtown, the libraries up here don't have any. Now I am in *rural* Contel territory and when the bill contains LD calls (he** just about every d**n line is LD) that are two months old, I start getting the same behavior from my family as I got from my roomates back in college. No I don't take the phone bill out of the kid's allowance -- but that's not a bad idea. I do like to audit the bill and make sure the CCN hasn't been stolen and the big ticket items are my own. Anyway, Contel folks can't criss cross like the SWB Lady can. They tell me that all they can do is call the number I am interested in and find who is there. Well I can do that, but of course I have to pay for the d**n call again. The best I ever got from an operator (SWB|GTE|CONTEL) is a name-place request. Has anyone out there every gotten an operator to criss-cross? Are there any alternatives beside that 900 CRISSCROSS service? If I cannot get criss-crossing for cheap then auditing outgoing DTMF is my next question. WARNING THIS IS PROBABLY AN FASR Does any one have the schematic for a cheap audit box I can connect to the phone line to print to a paper calculator printer (or EEPROM for later uploading to a PC): o outgoing DTMF, o date time and o when on-hook happens time (or elapsed time) RadioShack has a DTMF decoder chip for $12 and a schematic to send the BCD to an LEDDisplay. I am not an EE, so I cannot even begin to redesign that, but how difficult could it be send the BCD outputs to EEPROM? I have not built a circuit in fifteen years, I wuold appreciate any helpful advice/directions to documentation. BTW: A friend of mine bought a handheld DTMF to LED widget from one of those MercenaryToysRUs catalogs. I will try to get the catalog address if anyone is interested. APPRECIATIONS: Contel service. Fiber is just 250 feet away from the house. (Hoping for ISDN or fiberTV someday haha). DMS-10? 0.5 miles away. Friendly service personel. Isn't an appreciation paragraph better than a FLAME. DTMF:+1 214 985 2270 UUCP:uunet!vitec!nathan Nathan Banks, Senior Software Engineer Visual Information Technologies (VITec) 3460 Lotus Drive, Plano, TX 75075 [Moderator's Note: I suspect both SWB and Contel (most telcos?) actually call the business office of the telco serving the questioned number and get current information to provide in response to your question 'who did we call at that number?' They would not use a printed criss-cross because those books are only as accurate as the alphabetical directory they were sorted from. There are a dozen or so publishers of criss-cross books, the largest being Haines, Dresslers, City Publishing Co. and Donnelly. They seem to each take parts of the country and seldom overlap each other. Most libraries have at least the local criss-cross in their reference department and larger libraries may have several for nearby cities, etc. None of the criss-cross publishers solicit leases (they never sell their books) to individuals. They attempt to deal only with businesses, institutions and governments. PAT]
collins@epsl.umd.edu (Bernard F. Collins) (02/22/91)
In article <telecom11.140.8@eecs.nwu.edu> vitec!vitec.com!nathan@ uunet.uu.net (Nathan Banks) writes: > When I was in college in SWB territory I would call the BO when the > roomates could not recognise a long distance call. The BO would criss > cross it for me, giving me a name and *sometimes* an address. When > presenting this info to my roomates someone whould recognise the call > and 'fess up and (*usually*) cough up the $. The only restriction was > calls (he** just about every d**n line is LD) that are two months old, > If I cannot get criss-crossing for cheap then auditing outgoing DTMF > is my next question. Have you considered using AT&T's Call Manager service? It is free. It allows several people using the same phone to automatically keep track of who made what call. One dials the long distance number as if using a calling card, i.e. 0+10D. After the bong, instead of entering a calling card number, enter a four-digit code beginning with 15. The next two digits can be anything from 00 to 99. Each person can be assigned his own two digit code. Calls are sorted by these "account numbers" when the bill arrives. The whole scheme adds four digits to every LD call. But the annoyance of unclaimed calls at the end of the month is not missed. Skip Collins, (301) 792-6243, collins@wam.umd.edu