roy@phri (Roy Smith) (02/12/89)
I just got the most bizarre wrong number I've ever heard of. I'm
sitting at home and the phone rings. Somebody asks for Tony Herbert and I
tell him he has the wrong number (we get a lot of wrong numbers; NYTel must
reassign numbers pretty fast) and ask him what number he's calling. He says
he's calling from Holland and is trying to reach 718-636-11238, at which
point I tell him he's got too many digits for a US phone number. Apparently
he got me because the first 10 digits are indeed mine.
He then volunteers that he's trying to reach Tony Herbert from radio
station WNYE, who lives at 349 St. John's Place. This is really spooky
because I'm at 295 St. John's; 349 must be just a couple of buildings down
the street. At any rate, I offer to look up the phone number for him (I'm
sure he could have reached international directory assistance for free
instead of paying for the call, but he didn't seem to mind). It seems that
neither WNYE nor Tony are listed in the book (it turns out that directory
assistance has the listing for WNYE, but not for Tony). The guy gives me his
name and phone number in Holland and asks me if I would mind delivering a
message to Tony (which I agree that I will try to do).
We both remark on how strange a coincidence it is that he got a wrong
number just a couple hundred yards away from his target trying to place a
transatlantic phone call and on how good the line is (no echo at all, very
clean, and almost no delay, must have been on the new transatlantic fiber),
say goodbye, and hang up.
It's not until a couple of minutes later that I realize why the
number he had for me/Tony is so strange; with the extra '8' tacked on the
end, the last 5 digits become my zip code! Sounds like something out of The
Twilight Zone, but it's true. Even I couldn't make up a story this strange.
On a totally different topic, I'm looking for a phone which will work
well in a noisy environment (i.e. my computer room). It's almost impossible
to hear the other party on the line, even if they shout, with a normal phone.
Possibly all that has to be done is to attenuate the sidetone; if I put my
hand over the mouthpiece when the other party is talking, I can hear them
pretty well, but it's a pain, especially when you need one hand to hold the
phone, one to cover the mike, and one to type. Adjustable volume would
probably help too; even with the sidetone gone, it's still a little hard to
hear, but simply cranking up the volume alone won't change the S/N unless you
do something about picking up ambient noise.
BTW, trying to listen to the phone in a noisy room is one of the few
advantages that people who are deaf in one ear (as I am) have over
fully-hearing people. How many times have you seen somebody try to hold the
phone with one hand, cover the other ear with their second hand, and try to
write with their third? :-)
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) (02/16/89)
While Roy Smith's story is certainly charming, it is more explicable than it may seem at first glance. I'll take the easy part first: > neither WNYE nor Tony are listed in the book (it turns out that directory > assistance has the listing for WNYE, but not for Tony). In Bell Canada territory, at least, organizations whose names are just a sequence of letters are alphabetized in the phone book as though each letter was a word. And the alphabetization is by words: spaces and punctuation except apostrophes which are ignored, sort together at the beginning of the alphabet. (There's an interesting exception which I will explain in a separate message.) However, *some* radio and TV stations also buy listings under their name as a single word. You can tell these are extra listings because they tend to list fewer extensions. So, for instance, CKEY is listed both in the CK's and as C K E Y, but CJCL is only given as C J C L. Of course, a person who looks up CJCL as CJCL will see CKEY nearby, and think that that is the right place in the book and that CJCL is unlisted. So my conjecture is that NYNEX follows a similar system and Roy looked under WNYE instead of W N Y E. Of course, it could be the other way around. > ... he's calling from Holland and is trying to reach 718-636-11238 ... > he's trying to reach Tony Herbert from radio station WNYE, who lives at > 349 St. John's Place. This is really spooky because I'm at 295 St. John's. > ... It's not until a couple of minutes later that I realize why the number > he had for me/Tony is so strange; with the extra '8' tacked on the end, > the last 5 digits become my zip code! The fact that Roy's and Tony's places are so close together is the key. It means that they probably share both a ZIP code and a telephone prefix! Anyone might, in transcribing an address, or even in reciting it over the phone, absentmindedly substitute one block of digits for another. The error is a sort of long-range spoonerism. For instance, "30 Edith Drive, Suite 201" -- a genuine address near my house in Toronto -- might be accidentally given as "201 Edith Drive, Suite 30", an address which, if it existed, would be only a few blocks away. Similarly, the person who wrote down or who dictated Tony's address and phone number must have substituted Tony's ZIP code for the last part of Tony's phone number. Perhaps if Roy had asked the caller he would have found out that the caller had Tony's address listed with a 4-digit ZIP code! Now it should be clear what happened. The part that's a strange coincidence is that Roy, who is in a position to tell us all this, has a phone number whose last 4 digits are the same as the first 4 digits of his ZIP code. If the number formed by the error had been that of Joe's Bar and Grill, the Telecom list/newsgroup would never have heard. > We both remark on how strange a coincidence it is that he got a wrong > number just a couple hundred yards away from his target trying to place a > transatlantic phone call ... This is not only strange but expected, once you understand the original error. Anyone from North America would recognize the "ill-formed phone number" before they finished dialing it, and would abort the call. Such a mistake would therefore be made only by someone from overseas! > ... and on how good the line is ... However, this part I have no explanation for at all. :-) Mark Brader, SoftQuad Inc., Toronto utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com Professional Debugger of Wrong Numbers