hamilton@aztec.osbusouth.xerox.com (Bruce Hamilton) (09/22/89)
As an alumnus of Deep Springs College (1971-74), let me fill you in on the phone situation there. For at LEAST the past five years, it has been direct-dialable at 619/872-2000. Curiously, they only discovered this by ACCIDENT! They started getting wrong numbers and asked the caller what number they had dialed. (I guess Continental Telephone was afraid that if they admitted that they'd added direct-dial, they'd have to support it, or something stupid.) Within the last two years or so, ConTel's service got so noisy and unreliable that DS spent several thousand bucks and put in a microwave relay to replace the land lines that go up Silver Canyon from Bishop, CA and down Wyman Canyon to Deep Springs, CA (somewhere around 20 miles). Anyhow, they still have just the one phone line, which unfortunately does NOT support fax or modem, and along with the microwave they got some sort of mini-pbx that serves as an intercom system for around the ranch. Back when I was a student, we still had crank phones. Crank one long for the operator (originally in Bishop, but now way down south in Victorville, I believe). There were about half a dozen parties on our line, so you had to listen for our "Deep Springs #2" ring -- one long, three short. The other parties included a CalTrans highway maintenance station a mile away, a phone booth in Oasis, and a couple of other ranches over in Fish Lake Valley. It didn't even help to write down the "mark other place - inward routing" stuff, because it seemed like they changed the numbers every couple of years. I have written down 619+058+181, and I also have 887-225-0002, for what it's worth. p.s. For more information about Deep Springs, which was founded in 1917, has a student body of about 24 men, and combines a two-year full-scholarship liberal arts program with ranch work and self-government, you can write to the college at P.O. Dyer, Nevada 89010 or read a good article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Sunday 14 May 1989 (the one with Charles Manson on the cover :-)). --Bruce CSNet: Hamilton.osbuSouth@Xerox.COM UUCP: xerox.com!hamilton.osbuSouth 213/333-8075