telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (04/04/89)
The year was 1967. I was living in Hyde Park, one of the south side neighborhoods in Chicago. A fellow living in my building worked for Illinois Bell as a techician in the frames at the Chicago-Wabash central office downtown. Now this was long before ESS, of course, and in fact at the time, Wabash was an ancient step by step office; one of the first converted to dial from manual service in the early 1940's. Woody worked the 4-12 midnight shift on Saturday and Sunday, and had just a single clerk working with him; a woman who answered the calls to '611' repair service among other things. You would have to know something about the area to fully appreciate the story, but here goes anyway. The section of downtown Chicago where that CO is located is on the southern edge of the financial section. It is *dead* on Saturday evenings; no one is left in any of the offices to call Repair Service at that time on the weekend; at least not back then. So as often as not, the woman clerk taking 611 calls would sit there for several minutes at a time doing nothing. There was one fellow though, who *always* called at exactly 6:00 PM on Saturday, and would begin talking dirty to the woman who answered the repair line. I assume this chap was probably alone in his office, getting ready to go home for the night, and liked to get his jollies by talking dirty on the phone. He apparently assumed calls to 611 could not be traced; or at least he knew it was a free call and would cost him nothing for a couple minutes of thrills the way he liked to get them. You could set your watch by this guy. Every Saturday night; always at 6 PM; always to the same woman answering 611 calls; always two or three minutes of nasty talk while he was on the other end doing whatever it is that guys do while they are making calls of this sort. Woody the central office tech and the repair service lady always used to laugh about it. Around five minutes to six every Saturday night Woody would tell the woman, "oh, look at the time; its about time for your boyfriend to call..." One night Woody was feeling energetic, and he said to the clerk, let's catch that silly old fool tonight. The woman asked how, and Woody explained, thusly -- "You've got no calls now; when it lights up you know it will be him. No one else ever calls Repair at this time of the evening from downtown on Saturday night. "What I want you to do is this: when he calls, make your voice sound like a *recorded message*, and all I want you to say is 'Repair Service has a new number. To call Repair Service, please hang up and dial 230'..." In those days at least, '230' was a special test number which terminated on the test board. Woody had a special treat in mind for their gentleman caller that evening. Sure enough, within a minute or two, 611 gets a call. The woman answers and carefully recites, "This is a recorded message. Repair Service has a new telephone number. To reach Repair Service, please hang up and dial 230. Dial 230 to reach Repair Service. There is no charge for this call; this is a recorded message from Chicago-Wabash" (click). Sure enough, maybe ten seconds later, 230 lights up on the test board. "Get over here! Hurry up and answer this guy. I'll be on the line." Woody plugged in his headset in the test board, and the clerk plugged in the spare jack. Plugging in the cord, she answered, "Repair Service, how may I help you?" Sure enough, our boy was there, and his mouth started running right away. Woody got a big grin on his face, and he hit a couple keys on the test board and immediatly spoke up. "You son of a bitch! This time we caught you! I have wanted to nail you for the last six weeks, and this time we got you." Well, the chap immediatly hung up his phone, and Woody said he started ringing him back. From the test board, he could hold up the line as long as he wanted by keeping a shoe on the line, and he said to the clerk we will just play games as long as he wants to play games. Woody said he must have rang the guy's phone for 30 minutes trying to get him to pick up. "First I would give him a real long ring, like thirty seconds. Then a couple of short ding-dings. Then a couple long ones again. Finally after 30 minutes or so, the guy picked up, all the innocent bystander." "Hello?" "Say you! What's your name and your phone number?" "I'm not going to tell you." "Oh yeah? We'll see about that!" Woody says this banter went on for a few minutes, and finally the poor mousy fellow, by this point almost in tears, told him the number he was calling from. (Woody) "Well, I'm not so sure I can believe you. Tell you what I am going to do. It's time for my dinner break. I am going over to Walgreens and get a sandwich and some coffee. I'll be back in about an hour. Until I get back, I'll just leave your line the way it is; and when I get done with my dinner, I'll just take a walk into the frames and find out for myself who you are. You can go ahead and hang up if you want; I've got you locked down on the test board so I can find you later on." Woody says when he got back from dinner, he went in the frames and was able to verify that the caller had given the correct number. Checking their records, they found the name on the phone, and the address. I asked him what happened at that point. He said on Monday morning they told the Business Office. I asked what the Business Office did about it, and he said, "not very much! They slapped his wrist, and told him not to make that kind of phone call any more or they would cut his service off. It solved our problem anyway. We never heard from him on the Repair Desk again." That was 1967, and Woody had been with Illinois Bell about twenty years at that point in time. A few years later, he read in [Telephony Magazine] about some small rural telco out in Arizona that was going bankrupt. He retired from Bell, took the several thousand dollars he had in his pension fund account and bought into the rural telco. He moved to Arizona and became a part owner of his own telco, instead of working for Ma Bell any longer. The last I heard from him, about fifteen years ago, he loved it there, and said he would never return to Bell. No gripes with them; just that he liked being his own boss for a change. History books about the telephone industry say the first complaint of an obscene phone call was recorded by the manager of the New Haven exchange in February, 1881. The record does not indicate *what* the caller had to say, but it does report the callee was quite disturbed by the '...filthy language that strange man said to me on the phone....'. And the beat goes on. Patrick Townson