larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman) (07/15/90)
In article <9677@accuvax.nwu.edu> ah0i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Andrew A. Houghton) writes: > In brief, I have heard that at one time AT&T sent out "cleaning > pulses" in the wee hours of morning to "fuse shorts in the line." Reminds me of the "telephone pranks" friends and I used to pull while in college - like calling people at random, pretending to be from the telephone company, and asking them to place their telephone handset in a bucket because the telephone company was going to "purge moisture from the telephone cables." A surprising number of people actually fell for this. I digress, but the best one was pretending to be from the city sewer department, claiming that there was a sewer collapse, and asking people not to flush their toilet for 24 hours. The clincher on this one was eliciting cooperation by stating: "Now we can't stop you from flushing your toilet, but think about us sewer workers below trying to fix the problem..." :-) > Assuming this is drivel, is there any basis for such a thing? The statement you quoted is nonsense, but there are two factual elements which could contribute to its basis. The first is that ALIT (Automatic Line Insulation Testing) is performed during early morning hours when telephone traffic is at a minimum. In both this forum and sci.electronics, ALIT has been previously discussed because it sometimes causes a "chirp" on cheap electronic telephones. ALIT is strictly a passive measurement procedure. The second is that there is a troubleshooting procedure used to localize high-resistance cable faults on pulp cable using a "breakdown test set". A pair with a high resistance fault is isolated from the CO apparatus and a current-limited voltage of approximately 600 volts DC is placed on the pair. This voltage is usually enough to cause an arc and turn a high resistance fault into a dead short - making it easier to localize. With improved test apparatus such as TDR's, breakdown test procedures are no longer used as frequently as in past years. Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp. "Have you hugged your cat today?" {boulder||decvax||rutgers||watmath}!acsu.buffalo.edu!kitty!larry VOICE: 716/688-1231 || FAX: 716/741-9635 {utzoo||uunet}!/ \aerion!larry
zawada@en.ecn.purdue.edu (Paul J Zawada) (07/16/90)
kitty!larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman): > Reminds me of the "telephone pranks" friends and I used to > pull while in college - like calling people at random, pretending to > be from the telephone company, and asking them to place their > telephone handset in a bucket because the telephone company was going > to "purge moisture from the telephone cables." A surprising number of > people actually fell for this. I digress, but the best one was > pretending to be from the city sewer department, claiming that there > was a sewer collapse, and asking people not to flush their toilet for > 24 hours. The clincher on this one was eliciting cooperation by > stating: "Now we can't stop you from flushing your toilet, but think > about us sewer workers below trying to fix the problem..." :-) Reminds me of a story I heard about a radio station on the East Cost ... A disk jockey told his listeners that they should put plastic bags over the ear piece on their handset. This was because the phone company was going to "blow the dirt out" of the phone lines with a huge blast of air. People actually started to do this until the phone company protested to the station and demanded a retraction. The next day the disk jockey retracted the statement, saying that he was just kidding. He went on to say that anybody who knew anything about telephones knew they used a high vacuum to suck the dirt out ... Sigh. (This is all from memory, so if anybody remembers this, please correct any errors...) Paul J Zawada | zawada@ei.ecn.purdue.edu Titan P3 Workstation Support | ...!pur-ee!zawada Purdue University Engineering Computer Network