telecom@bu-cs.BU.EDU (TELECOM Moderator) (01/22/89)
Pat Zsetenyi operates an interior design business in one of the south suburbs of Chicago. On the day she opened her business, she thought she had hit upon a gold mine. After going out for a few hours, she returned to her office to find the answering machine on her new number loaded with calls. "I was thrilled," said Zsetenyi. "It was my first day in business and I had all these messages on my answering machine already." Then she realized no one could be calling her yet, since no one knew the new number. Well then, whose calls *did* she have? When she played back the messages, there were dozens of calls for United Airlines, which has a reservations number that is almost the same as hers -- just two digits are transposed. At the time she did not know it, but she had joined an elite group of people, who through no fault of their own, have phone numbers easily mistaken for frequently dialed numbers. She says she gets anywhere from ten to dozens of wrong numbers per day. If the weather is bad or there is some incident at the airport, then the calls really start pouring in. She pointed out the most amazing part of the whole thing are the people who call and get her answering machine. They hear the whole outgoing message "Thank you for calling Zsetenyi's Decorating Den" and then they still proceed to leaving a message for United Airlines, asking to be "....called back when the reservations office is open...." "...one lady called back three days in a row, saying , 'Why won't you return my call? I need my tickets!'....I finally called her and told her she was never going to hear from United at the rate she she was going..." Area Code 312 is very rapidly filling up, which increases the odds that misdials will reach a working number. Because of the growing scarcity of numbers until 708 kicks in later this year, the period of time a disconnected number is held before being reassigned has been reduced from several months to a few weeks at most. In years past, 'notorious' numbers -- such as those belonging to call girls -- would be retired from service for YEARS after being disconnected. This is a luxury no longer available here. Hillary Anderson, a spokeswoman for Illinois Bell Telephone said she has the same problem with her home phone which happens to be very similar to the main switchboard number for W. W. Grainger Company. Ms. Anderson said that anyone can have their number changed if it bothers them, "...but yet, most people with easily mistaken phone numbers do not want to change them. It is not a matter of the fee involved. IBT charges $33 to change someone's phone number, but as a matter of good relations with our customers, we will waive the fee whenever someone is receiving an 'annoying amount' of wrong numbers. I can write off that charge from a customer's bill, but it seems like instead of being annoyed, those people seem to relish their odd distinction." About fifteen years ago, I had an office in downtown Chicago on one of the first ESS exchanges to open up here in the Chicago-Wabash office. My number was WEbster 9-4600. At the time, Sears Roebuck's national credit card office was also downtown. Unlike me with two lines on a desk phone, Sears then had a big old fashioned *five position* cord board with the lead number in their hunt group being WAbash 2-4600. Now 939 and 922 are not that similar, but one day a new AT&T toll switcher opened on Canal Street. In a simple accident, 922 was incorrectly translated by that office to 939....need I say more? For two days straight, I was flooded with calls for Sears' credit department. It was fun while it lasted. On complaining I was told I should change my number. I told them that number had been in service for 13 years and would not get changed. "So what," said the service rep. "Sears has had WAbash 2-4600 for *sixty five years* and they probably won't change theirs either!" Patrick Townson
wrf@juliet.rpi.edu (Wm Randolph Franklin) (01/23/89)
If the Interior Decorator thought that United wasn't exercising appropriate care in publicizing its correct number, could they say something like this on their tape, "No matter who our employer is, for personal travel we much prefer American at xxx-xxxx"? It could be a true statement, not libellous to United, that would cost them a lot of business, and that would not tip off someone who thought he was talking to a United number. Wm. Randolph Franklin Internet: franklin@cs.rpi.edu Bitnet: Wrfrankl@Rpitsmts Telephone: (518) 276-6077; Telex: 6716050 RPI TROU; Fax: (518) 276-6003 Paper: ECSE Dept., 6026 JEC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY, 12180
desnoyer@Apple.COM (Peter Desnoyers) (01/24/89)
Along those lines - The exchange for dormitory phones at MIT is 225, and there is a room in New House? Next House? with the phone number (617) 225-8xyz, where 1-800-225-8xyz is the toll-free number for reservations for the Sheraton across the river. I knew someone who was unfortunate enough to live in that room - the problem is that you can't dial 800 numbers from outside the U.S., so many of the people who call the number are foreign, speak English poorly, and are in a different time zone. Several callers were persistent enough that she had to take reservations to get rid of them. (or so she says) The switch was an old step-by-step, and the crafts where surly part-time students, so the easiest way for her to change her number was to move to another room. Peter Desnoyers
linimon@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Mark Linimon) (01/24/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0024m01@vector.UUCP> you write: >In a simple >accident, 922 was incorrectly translated by that office to 939....need I say >more? For two days straight, I was flooded with calls for Sears' credit >department. It was fun while it lasted. It's horror stories you want? At school (Rice) the dorms have fixed phone numbers assigned, per room. i.e. if you are in 701 Sid Rich this year you will have the same number whoever had 701 Sid Rich had last year. All in all, understandable. Well in 450 we always got calls for American Savings. Never could figure out why. Finally one day I was driving down I-45 (one of the major drags through town) to Galveston...and there's this giant billboard for American Savings... :-) We did try to convince American Savings to at least _change the billboard_, but to no avail. We were nice to the callers for the first few months, then after that we got to the point where we would walk them through getting their balance and make up outlandish numbers... Disclaimer: this was years ago. In the meantime I grew up. :-) Mark Linimon killer!nominil!linimon
miket@brspyr1.brs.com (Mike Trout) (01/25/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0024m01@vector.UUCP>, telecom@bu-cs.BU.EDU (TELECOM Moderator) writes: > She says she gets anywhere from ten to dozens of wrong numbers per day. If > the weather is bad or there is some incident at the airport, then the calls > really start pouring in. She pointed out the most amazing part of the whole > thing are the people who call and get her answering machine. They hear the > whole outgoing message "Thank you for calling Zsetenyi's Decorating Den" > and then they still proceed to leaving a message for United Airlines, asking > to be "....called back when the reservations office is open...." It is apparently human nature to refuse to believe that you've dialed a wrong number unless you've been confronted with unimpeachable evidence. A friend of mine spent a few years working as the receptionist for a local contractor named Eastern Heating and Cooling Inc. She used to get at least one call a week, and usually considerably more, intended for Eastern Air Lines. Some confusion may be due to the fact that, if you open the Albany phone book to the general area for Airline Companies, you may easily spot the huge ad for Eastern Heating and Cooling Inc. which is in the Air Conditioning Contractors & Systems section. Never mind that Eastern Heating logo is nothing like the Eastern Air Lines logo, the Eastern Heating ad contains phrases like "25 Radio Dispatched Vehicles" and "Walk-in Coolers and Freezers," as well as logos for Trane, Carrier, York, and Bryant. Anyway, the conversations would usually go something like this: +++ My friend: "Eastern Heating and Cooling, may I help you?" Caller: "Yes, I'd like to get some information about this afternoon's flight to Atlanta." MF: "I'm sorry, sir, but this is Eastern Heating and Cooling. You want Eastern Air Lines." C: "Yes, but what's the price on the non-stop from Albany to Atlanta?" MF: "I don't have that information. This is NOT Eastern Air Lines." C: "Okay, but why can't you tell me how much the ticket is?" MF: "Because you dialed the wrong number. Check the phone book under Eastern Air Lines." C: "Look, you have a flight to Atlanta, flight number 689 leaving Albany at 5:50, right?" MF: "No. All we have are 25 radio dispatched trucks." C: "I don't like the way you're speaking with me. Please connect me with your supervisor." MF: "Okay, but he's gonna be mad because right now he's busy taking apart a heat pump." C: "$#*@*&!!! I just want you to know I'm never flying Eastern Air Lines again!" (hangs up) +++ Under that Eastern Heating ad is an ad for American Heating and Cooling Inc. I'd love to know what kind of calls they get THERE... -- NSA food: Iran sells Nicaraguan drugs to White House through CIA, DIA & NRO. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Michael Trout (miket@brspyr1)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ BRS Information Technologies, 1200 Rt. 7, Latham, N.Y. 12110 (518) 783-1161 "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without...a rebellion." Thomas Jefferson
DLynn.ElSegundo@Xerox.COM (01/25/89)
Your message brings back some old memories. When in college, I made the mistake of asking for "an easy-to-remember number". Pac Tel had a list of repetitive numbers that, for no extra charge, they would issue for those who asked. Essentially only businesses asked, and so nearly all the adjacent numbers were big businesses. I got so many wrong numbers that I kept a list by the phone of the most often called ones, and gave the correct number out to most wrong dialers. If I didn't, some callers would dial again and again. Some callers claimed the business card they were reading really said 8 where I knew it had to read 3, 6 or 9. Must have been really small type or smeared printing. I got a lot of calls where they dialled 8 instead of 7, too; must have been finger-aiming error. It was pretty funny one morning hearing an operator trying to get out of me why I would not accept a collect call; she had never had a business refuse to accept, and it didn't dawn on her that she had got the wrong number. I wasn't very coherent explaining this, since it was about 6 am, and I had been up studying most the night. The caller (from the east coast) didn't apparently believe in time zones. I think my roommate took a couple of orders from callers who wouldn't believe they had dialled wrong. Some poor devil is probably still waiting for his water cooler to be delivered. We never asked for our number to be changed. I don't know whether it was the thought of an unneccessary expense (no one offered to change it for free, but then we didn't complain much), or whether we were just too naive to know we were being bothered. That summer, my roommate stayed over the summer, and with essentially all school friends gone, he went for weeks at a time with wrong numbers only, none intended for him. He started answering every call with "I'm sorry you have dialled the wrong number." He was wrong only once. /Don Lynn DLynn.ElSegundo@Xerox.COM
wb8foz@uunet.UU.NET (David Lesher) (01/25/89)
The classic had to be Mike Royko, columnist for the [Chicago Tribune]. AT&T had new 800-xxxxxxx customer service number. Alas, Mike's home phone was 312-xxxxxxx. He wrote a nice piece about how he was going to tell all the people calling they didn't deserve service and he would see to it they were disconnected, and various other threats. Seems to me Ma ended up taking out an ad in his paper, next to his space to beg forgiveness. [Moderator's Note: Actually, it was his office telephone. The [Chicago Tribune] centrex is 312-222. His private number 312-222-3xxx was commonly dialed by people wanting AT&T at 1-800-222-3xxx. These were people who failed to dial the 1-800 first. AT&T frequently advertises in the Chicago papers, but their ad in this instance was to remind people to 'dial 1-800 first, when calling a toll-free number.' I think the easiest telephone number to remember in the world must be the Tribune classified ad-takers: 312-222-2222. P. Townson] ----------------------------- Date: Wed, 25 Jan 89 02:41:34 EST From: Miguel_Cruz@ub.cc.umich.edu To: telecom@bu-cs.bu.edu Subject: One More Wrong Number Story Just one more wrong number victim story. My next-door neighbor in the dorm some years ago had a number that was exactly the same as the local power company except that he had a 4 where they had a 1, two digits that are right on top of each other on a TT pad. In the beginning of the year, he would just tell people that they had a wrong number, but as the year went on, he started being quite mischievous with callers who refused to admit to having dialed a wrong number. He would apologize, and ask them to describe their electricity problem. Billing inquiries he would refer to the proper number, but he came up with some incredibly bizarre responses to service/repair questions. I still feel sorry for the woman he told to unplug all her appliances and unscrew all of her lightbulbs and wait for the truck that would be there in "half hour to 45 minutes". Not such a good story in the retelling, I guess. Oh, well.
roy@phri (Roy Smith) (01/26/89)
My old 2nd line (i.e. modem) number used to differ by a transposition
(or some other small difference) from the financial aid office at New York
City Technical College. This was no problem until they sent out a memo one
September to all their students with a typo on it. Lots of wrong numbers all
of a sudden. We eventually got somebody who was patient enough to help us
work out what happened ("where did you get this number", "it's on the memo",
"what memo?", "the memo I got in the mail", "would you please be so kind as
to read it to me", "...", "are you sure that's the number that's written on
the paper?", etc).
Anyway, we called the financial aid office and complained. It was
amazingly difficult to make them understand what had happened:
Me: Hi, you don't know me, but you sent out a memo telling people to call
your office and gave my number by mistake.
Them: What's your number?
Me: xxx-xxxx
Them: No, that's not our number, there must be some mistake.
Me: Yes, that's the point, you told people to call my number.
Them: No, I'm sorry, that's impossible, and we [getting a bit rude here]
really can't be responsible for people dialing a wrong number.
Me: Can you please go into your file cabinet and pull out a copy of the memo
and read it to me?
Them: I don't have a copy of it here, maybe you better talk to .....
Eventually, I finally got some higher-up administrator to actually go
find a copy of the memo and read it out loud to me, taking her to task when
she read past the phone number, unconcously saying the correct number for the
financial aid office. Long pause. "Oh, we made a mistake". No shit,
sherlock. I eventually convinced her that it would be in both our best
interests' if she would send out a memo correcting the mistake: "Dear
student, please note that the phone number for the financial aid office is
xxx-xxxx, not yyy-yyyy as stated in the last letter. She did so.
Of course, next semester, some grunt took the memo out of the file
cabinet, xeroxed 100 million of them, and sent them out to all the students
again. I'll leave it up to you to guess if they bothered to correct the
phone number before they did so.
Eventually we took to leaving the modem on all the time. Not really
very nice, but what could I do? I would imagine I would be pretty frantic if
I got a memo saying "unless you call this office before next Friday, you'll
loose out on your financial aid" and every time I called the number, got
sombody screaching at me. Could you imagine if you had a cellular phone and
paid for incomming calls and this happened? The kicker to the story is a
little while after we took to modemizing people, we read in the paper that
some crazy person had walked into the financial aid office and started
shooting at random, killing several people. Could it be that he was just
frustrated by getting a modem whistle at him whenever he called about his aid
package? I hope not.
--
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"
[Moderator's Note: I had the identical experience in 1972. At the time, my
'second line' was actually my direct line. I lived in an apartment building
with a front desk/manual switchboard. I had a two line 'turn button phone'
with the switchboard line on one side and my private number HYde Park 3-3714
on the other side of the button. The Draper & Kramer Real Estate Company
sent out a memo to all tenants in a huge (500 units) highrise building telling
them how to reach the building engineer for maintainence requests, etc.
Guess whose number was given in error when some digits were transposed. I
fought with those people for a year!
I finally had success only by being *rude* to the callers; to wit if they
complained of no heat or no hot water I would cheerfully 'put them on hold'
for a minute and come back on the line to advise them according to my
records, 'the rent you are paying does not include heat or hot water'. After
D&K got an earful from angry tenants complaining about '...that rude janitor
you have working in the Fifteen-Fifty-Five Building' they decided to issue
a new memo. I called it my own version of 'gorilla' (guerilla) warfare! PT]ron@ron.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (01/27/89)
Yes, I noticed that. When I worked at a radio station we used to get calls for Sears repair service all the time. Me: Good Morning, WJHU. Caller: Is this Sears? Me: Nope, it's a radio station. Caller: Well my washer stopped working. Me: Can't help you, this is a radio station. Everyonce and a while I took parts orders. It was easier than trying to convince them they dialed wrong. I also used to get calls for Doreen (prounce DOUGH-REEENE). Me: (sleepily, its 2 AM) Caller: Let me speek to Doreen. Me: Doreen says she don't want to talk to you no more. We're going back to bed now, so don't you call again.
keithb@reed (01/27/89)
Along these same (wrong number confusion) lines... A local fraternal
organization (which should remain nameless except they're probably most-
known for their in-lodge bar rather than community efforts) has a number
just like our's except for the rolled last digit pair.
Well, we're used to the "Is Harry there (spoken just like your grandfather
would 'bark' it when he felt ornery at not being able to find his buddy)?"
But one day a couple of years ago, one of our local matrons called us
accidentally; and in a very stuporous state, wanted all kinds of company.
I'd even do, it didn't matter that this wasn't the lodge, or that I didn't
belong to the lodge, or that I was, oh, 30 years her junior. As the
Teaneck or Brentwood of Oregon, this just isn't what I'd expected from
our locals. Oh well, I'd seen The Graduate.
-Keith
Keith Brown
UUCP: {decvax allegra ucbcad ucbvax hplabs ihnp4}!tektronix!reed!keithb
BITNET: keith@reed.BITNET ARPA: keithb%reed.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu
CSNET: reed!keithb@Tektronix.CSNET CIS: 72615,216larryc@mtuxo.att.com (XMRH6-L.CHESAL) (01/28/89)
I recall reading a story (in the Miami Herald Sunday magazine, I think) about a sportswriter who moved to a new town and as soon as he arrived, he got a call from a bar where someone asked him to settle a bet about the winner of the 19xx World Series or something. He was flattered, gave the right answer, hung up, and then couldn't figure out how they knew he was the new sportswriter in town. He then began getting calls asking for stuff like the average winter temperature in Brazil, the distance to the moon, and the genus and species of endangered animals. Turns out his new phone number was the same as the (recently changed) Reference section of the Public Library. Larry Chesal (201) 576-6179 att!mtuxo!larryc
ron@ron.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (01/28/89)
My favorite is that we had a close number to the pre-equal-access Sprint access number. It was one of our modem lines and we used to hear people dialing up and pushing touch tones trying to make long distance calls on our modem. -Ron
john@jetson.UPMA.MD.US (John Owens) (01/29/89)
When my wife and I moved into our apartment in January, we got a number that had been recently given up by Jartran truck rental, who had closed their local office. To make things worse, the number had been Jartran's recently enough to be in the current phone book, published in January, just *after* we moved in. So, naturally, we got large numbers of calls asking if we could rent trucks. After we moved into our house (the apartment was temporary), we decided to go ahead and get the redirect intercept, so people could find us. [We had moved four times in four years; at one point, I could follow a chain of three old numbers where all the redirects were still in place.] Naturally, we still got calls for Jartran truck rental. Typical conversations: Caller: I'd like to rent a truck. Me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number. Caller: Is this xxx-xxxx? Me: Yes it is, but that's the wrong number. Caller: But I got it from the recording. Me: Well, actually, the number you called to get the recording was wrong. Caller: How do you know what number I called? Me: It used to be our number. [Of course!] Caller: But it says right here in the phone book that yyy-yyyy is the Jartran number. Usually, of course, I wasn't this patient. One day, my wife was sick and stayed home from work. She got almost twenty calls for Jartran that day! [She said she doesn't know why they closed the office; they had plenty of potential business!] So she decided to do something about it, and called the local telco. They suggested redirecting to the special operator, who would ask who was being called and play either the redirect or a disconnect message. This worked out well, and we stopped getting calls for Jartran. A few months later, I got a call from an old friend who said he had had a terrible time trying to get my number. Every time he'd call the old number (long distance), he'd get the special operator, who'd ask who he was calling. He'd try to tell her, but she couldn't hear him, and would hang up. He finally got a local (to him) operator who knew what was happening: the LD company wouldn't open the voice path in the other direction until it got answer supervision and could start charging. She was able to force the path open, and he finally got the number.... One Bell System: it worked. -- John Owens john@jetson.UPMA.MD.US uunet!jetson!john +1 301 249 6000 john%jetson.uucp@uunet.uu.net [Moderator's Note: It sure did work. If they wanted to open the market to a variety of long distance companies, that's fine with me. But why the judge felt he had to bash the smithereens out of the Bell System in the process is beyond me. PT]
rick@cs.utexas.edu (Rick Watson) (01/30/89)
We used to have 454-1212 (remember what 555-1212 is). We got pretty good at just looking up the number in the book for the unsuspecting caller. My roomate would look up the number and then see how much time he could spend getting the caller to talk about the weather in their part of the country, etc. Rick Watson University of Texas Computation Center arpa: watson@utadnx.cc.utexas.edu (128.83.1.26) uucp: ...cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!rick bitnet: watson@utadnx span: utspan::watson (UTSPAN is 25.128) phone: 512/471-8220 512/471-3241
levitt@zorro.FIDONET.ORG (Ken Levitt) (01/30/89)
In our town there were two exchanges, 655 and 653. After having one of our numbers for 9 years, we suddenly started getting numerous wrong numbers. It turned out that a new catalogue showroom store had just opened and had the 653 number corresponding to our 655 number. When I complained to the store manager, he suggested we change our phone number. I told him that we had been using our number for 9 years and he had been using his for two weeks but this failed to convince him to change his number. I also pointed out that he would be loosing a lot of business if many of his calls were routed to an unfriendly phone number. Nothing changed his mind. Many of the calls were similar to ones reported in previous Telecom Digests and I did find myself takeing phone orders for merchandise. Usually I just told people that we don't take phone calls and hung up. Finally, I changed the message on our answering machine to a very generic one and left the machine on all of the time. One of the funniest messages that I ever got was from one of the store's employees saying that he would not be into work that day. After two years of this the store went out of business. All was quiet for a year or so and then we started getting a lot of calls for Tommy. The calls came at strange hours, the people sounded kind of spacey, and even though there seemed to be a wide variety of people calling when I answered the phone, no one ever left a message on the machine. I came up with a theory that Tommy must be a drug dealer. For a while when people called for Tommy, I told them that he wasn't in and asked them if they wanted to leave a message. No one would ever leave a message. Then the calls died down and I forgot about Tommy until this week when we found a message on the machine saying "Tommy, this is your mom, please call me.". You would think that Tommy's mom would be able to tell that the voice on the tape was not Tommy's. Ken Levitt FidoNet: 1:16/390 (Mail accepted 01:30-07:00 est) UUCP: ...harvard!talcott!zorro!levitt INTERNET: levitt%zorro.uucp@talcott.harvard.edu
jbh@mibte.UUCP (James Harvey) (02/01/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0029m02@vector.UUCP>, cucstud!wb8foz@uunet.UU.NET (David Lesher) writes: > The classic had to be Mike Royko, columnist for the [Chicago Tribune]. > AT&T had new 800-xxxxxxx customer service number. Alas, Mike's home phone > was 312-xxxxxxx. He wrote a nice piece about how he was going to tell all the > people calling they didn't deserve service and he would see to it they were > disconnected, and various other threats. Seems to me Ma ended up taking out > an ad in his paper, next to his space to beg forgiveness. > > > [Moderator's Note: Actually, it was his office phone. The [Chicago Tribune] > centrex is 312-222. His private number 312-222-3xxx was commonly dialed by > people wanting AT&T at 1-800-222-3xxx. These were people who failed to dial > the 1-800 first. AT&T frequently advertises in the Chicago papers, but their > ad in this instance was to remind people to 'dial 1-800 first, when calling a > toll-free number.' I think the easiest telephone number to remember in the > world must be the Tribune classified ad-takers: 312-222-2222. P. Townson] > > ----------------------------- > I thought this number was disconnected in most areas. The reason I heard was that there is a defective dialer chip that is/was very popular in cordless phones with automatic redial function, memory etc. The defective chip would fail in such a way that it would take the phone off hook and start dialing twos all by itself. -- Jim Harvey | "Ask not for whom the bell Michigan Bell Telephone | tolls and you will only pay 29777 Telegraph | Station-to-Station rates." Southfield, Mich. 48034 | ulysses!gamma!mibte!jbh [Moderator's Note: It is still listed in large, colorful bold print on the front page of the advertising tabloid they insert in the paper each day. "Dial 222-2222 to place your ad now!" The number and whatever it hunts to terminates in an ACD in the Classified Ads Department. 3000-4000 phone calls are received daily at 35 'advertising counselor' positions, so it is possible they would not recognize a wrong number if they got one. PT]
eravin@dasys1.UUCP (Ed Ravin) (02/04/89)
Numerous messages have been posted to TELECOM about what happens when by coincidence misprinted, mis-announced or common dialing errors produce telephone numbers that arrive at some undeserving victim's home instead. One thing I didn't see posted was what happens when someone calls a BBS and say "Hey, man, great new board at 123-4567. Call it now!" and mistypes a few digits in the process. Whoever lives at the wrong number gets a mountain of modem calls, usually at 3 AM or whenever the BBS junkies are awake. Alas, there is a malicious variation of this, where someone posts a number and claims it is a new BBS when it is really the home phone of someone they want to harass. This happened in New York several years ago by a fellow nicknamed "the wimp" who had a hobby of trying to crash BBS's and harass sysops. The most diabolical twist was a message he posted one day under a false name that said "New hacking/phreaking bbs! Call 123-4567. First twenty callers get a working CompuServe account". The number posted was the home phone of a sysop this guy didn't like. Responsible sysops do not let messages from unknowns get posted without validation, and usually call the proposed number to see if it is really a bbs before allowing it to be visible to the users, but not all bbs's are so responsible. -- Ed Ravin | cucard!dasys1!eravin | "A mind is a terrible thing (BigElectricCatPublicUNIX)| eravin@dasys1.UUCP | to waste-- boycott TV!" --------------------------+----------------------+----------------------------- Reader bears responsibility for all opinions expressed in this article.