Installfests:Cats

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:07:47PM +0300, Peter wrote:
> the telecom people who knew from experience that 000 is the number that 
> is least likely to be dialed by glitch in a rotary dialer system.

Well glitches can dial 911 quite easily.  I had a phoneline a few years
ago that went staticy on me, and sometimes just didn't work.  After a
few days of this, I got a call in the morning while sleeping from 911
asking if there was a problem because they just got a call from there,
so I told them my line had been acting up.  After that it became rather
urgent on Bell's part to figure out what was wrong with the line, and
after a few days (with a few dispatches from 911 because of "calls" from
the line) they detected a short to ground when it started raining.
After that they replaced the line in the ground and the problem went
away.

Apparently a broken phone line shorting to ground can pulse 911 fairly
regularly.  I suppose it pulsed other numbers too at random, but none of
those ever called back, or at least not persistently enough to get
through.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml