Something similar happened to a friend of mine in a hotel back in the days of dial-up. His laptop dialer was hiccuping, and instead of dialing 9-1-(access number) was dialing 99-11-(access number). After a couple of tries, a couple of cops showed up at the room wondering what was going on.
Growing up I had a SO whose phone number had the pattern: XXX-XX9-11XX. I also had a hidden landline in my room for when my parents would take my phone at night. One night, around 2AM, my call redirected to an emergency dispatcher as if I had dialed 911, and I promptly hung up the phone (out of fear). When I redialed the number I was again redirected, and such a conversation ensued:
ME: Sorry, my phone seems to be redirecting my calls. I apologize for disruption. Please don't dispatch an officer to my home.
DISPATCHER: We are definitely sending over an officer.
ME: Please don't. I'm going to get in a lot of trouble.
DISPATCHER: ... Okay, now the officer is going to check your home and verify with each member of the family that everything is alright.
My parents were not pleased to be woken up by a police officer at 2AM to check if they were okay. I got in a lot of trouble. I then called my ISP and had them add the troubled phone number to a list of non-redirecting numbers.
I believe the cell number I was calling was issued before ISPs started redirecting numbers with 911 to emergency dispatch. The redirection of my call was probably a result of my ISP implementing the redirection.
Nope. It’s fine to have the substring “911” in your phone number. This guy must have experienced a hiccup in the system somewhere. What I want to know is how he managed to get a secret landline installed in his parents’ house.
Or they just had a spare phone they plugged into the socket their parents didn't know about (the phone not the socket). I'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already.
You're exactly correct. There was a hidden RJ11 socket behind my bed that I plugged a previously-forgotten phone into. There was only one line shared throughout the house, which occasionally caused some problems with my _master plan_.
I'd be surprised if OP has gone and spliced an additional line instead of their just being a socket in their room already.
I wouldn't. This is how the nerdier of my friends got their computers online in the 80's.
In early modem days, a lot of people bought modems without thinking the whole process through. Once they got it home, they realized that either the room with the computer didn't have a phone line, the phone jack was inconveniently located, or after spending $300 on a 150-300 baud modem, they didn't realize they'd have to spend another $200 on a phone line + $50/month for the jack + $xx for dialtone.
Splicing phone lines and fishing them through the walls with a coat hangar became an art. And if it wasn't practical in your house, you sometimes ran a phone line through the trees to your buddy's house.
When I was a kid I "spliced" a line (connected it to screw terminals in the box on the side of the house) from my parent's main phone to the basement so I could shotgun two dial-up modems in the middle of the night (the basement already was wired for the 2nd fax/internet line). I wasn't explicitly trying to keep it a secret, but I also didn't tell anyone, my dad found it after a couple months when he tried to make a particularly late phone call and heard modem noise.
There was an existing RJ11 socket in the wall behind my bed. Sadly, nothing more exciting.
It's totally possible it was a hiccup. I had been using the line for weeks with the same number, and then it suddenly started to reliably redirect to emergency dispatch.
I thought I had read previously that numbers containing 911 would redirect in the case that a potential victim has misdialed in a hurry. This incident was over a decade ago, so its possible that I misread an article or found a garbage source.
Ah, you had a secret handset, not (land)line (or, as per Ernestine, instrument).
Basically, decades ago, 411 was the first "N11" to come into common use, for "local directory assistance"; and 611 was for "repair service". But all 8 were reserved ( https://www.nationalnanpa.com/number_resource_info/n11_codes... ), and there was no way they were going to rescind all the already-existing phone numbers with "11" in them, or even with "911", since they'd been in use forever.
Some random examples of real numbers with "911" in them: 800-345-1911 is the South Hackensack office of TransAxle; 800-349-1100 is (or was) Louisiana Health Monitoring.
Great examples and I had never thought to consider the origin, or even relatedness, of the N11 numbers. Thank you for the reference!
You are correct, I should have said handset. I'm not sure if this is common, but with the involvement of cellphones in the house my family began referring to any handset in the house as "the landline."
Example: "Can you grab the landline in the kitchen, I'm on the cell."
Check your maths. A 10 digit number has 10^10 possibilities, but there are 8 different positions that the 911 can be in, each of which consumes 10^7 possibilities. So now there are 10^10 - 7*10^7, or 9920000000 possibilities.
(edit: Actually, this doesn't take account of multiple occurrences of 911 in the number, but it's a fairly close approximation.)
This is common almost everywhere in the world as the 0 and 1 prefix (the plus in the +XXX landcodes) are usually used for international selection but might require an additional 0 or 1 after the first 0. Though in my country and most of Europe the 1 is not a international prefix.
I believe I read somewhere that this is largely a myth—that some specific 555 numbers are kept empty for fictional use, but that some of them are legitimate.
800-555-TELL used to be a voice-operated information service complete with turn by turn navigation, eventually purchased by Microsoft IIRC. XXX-555-1212 used to be an information number (both may still exist; I haven't checked).
While there are rules about the use of 555 numbers, there are a number of local phone companies in the U.S. that don't care, and treat it something like a 10.x.x.x IP address for local use. Things like calling the telco for repairs, or billing inquiries.
It is entirely possible that I was wrong about numbers containing 911 redirecting. This incident was over a decade ago, and I was just recalling what I researched as a cause back when it had happened. I would be willing to bet there are people on this forum much more versed in telecom that will be able to set the record straight.
In about 2003 I had a rotary phone. My girlfriend tried to call her friend who's number started with 912. She didn't turn the 2 all the way. She hung up when the cops answered. That prompted an immediate callback and a pop-over shortly after.
I still have rotary phones in my house. Powderpuff blue in the kitchen. Black in my office. Goldenrod in the bedroom.
The local telco doesn't support pulse dialing anymore, but there's a guy in Australia who make a little line-powered box that translates pulses into DTMF. It even does * and #, but I forget how.
> it is surprisingly easy to communicate with the Earth while aboard a space station in orbit. He suggested astronauts can reach terrestrial phones via satellites around 70 percent of the time
That SHOULD be surprising, but the real surprise to me is that I had never thought about it being hard.
We live in age with enough wonders that I take them for granted. I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing.
I suspect that is because you mix up two different things: the wonders, and human nature. The wonders are amazing. That it is human nature to normalize to the point of taking them for granted might appear depressing. On the other hand, almost everything that we have normalized is mind-blowing and non-obvious when you think about it for long enough. So normalization is also a necessary coping mechanism to get stuff done.
Well, you could drive straight up for the 4 hours just so you could wave as it passed you going 70+ times faster than a formula one race car. Alternatively after the drive you can have the worst car accident in history.
Never have I ever been in a call where the latency was dictated by speed of light, since about early 1990s when phone lines went digital. There's an awful lot of routing and switching along the (rather indirect) way, and each hop adds some ms to the mess. Even if the call was only Houston-transatlantic (or worse, transpacific for whatever peering reason)-Netherlands, you'd get pretty bad latency. Add the orbit-relay station-Houston leg, and I assume you'd have a bad time.
Ham radio, on the other hand - now we would be talking significant fractions of c!
In the 1970s (early 80s? my memory is not good) calls sometimes went via satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Those had a lot of latency and didn't last long for that reason. ISS in low earth orbit shouldn't have much latency so long as they have a connection back down to the ground that doesn't involve other satellites.
That's a big if, its orbit can take it pretty much anywhere. But even given a direct downlink, much of the telephone call latency is an artifact of call routing on the ground.
Not sure its true of this one, but some groundstation networks use a bent pipe model, where the radio at the groundstation is doing a bare minimum and then forwarding the data to a compute center located elsewhere. This gives you all the latency on the ground of getting from the physical groundstation site to another location, which could be quite far away, even opposite side of the globe if all the compute is in the same place.
Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread that the ISS is using IP telephony over their geosynchronous satellite link. There's your latency.
> to reach the center in Houston, orbiting astronauts have to dial 9 for an outside line, followed by 011 for an international line
> His comms slip-up set off a security alert at the Houston center, he explained, with emergency staff to check the room where the space station’s line connected to Earth.
Dialing 9 and "outside lines" implies there's some sort of PBX system, which makes sense. What I don't get though, is if the outside lines are in Houston, why do you have to dial the international access code 011 to call Houston? I thought maybe there was a country code allocated to the ISS, but according to a Reddit thread, they just use Houston numbers [1]. I think the first bit from the article is just a mistake (eg he wasn't calling a Houston number, just through Houston).
Aside, it's amazing how many (new) PBXs still use the "dial 9" requirement. If you dial a 10 digit number (in North America), it's obviously destined for an outside line. If you avoid assigning extensions that conflict with area codes, you can even use early dialing (where the call is placed as soon as a number pattern is recognized), but that's optional as the system will just wait a few seconds to see if you're dialing more digits or not. Already anyone with an extension that starts with the local area code probably already gets lots of misdialed calls since people forget to dial 9 all the time.
They might just provide the numbers with the 011 included at the front so no one has to remember if they need to dial the extension. Makes sense given the astronauts travel all over the world doing training before launch so they've probably dialed the number with the extension at least as much as dialing the bare number, also note this was a Dutch astronaut so he probably learned the number including the 011.
Not sure why this is being downvoted, as I'm pretty sure that's the correct answer.
9 - gets him out of the internal exchange
011 - gets him out of the USA
xx - country code (probably 31 for the Netherlands)
then whatever other numbers are required inside the Netherlands
I think this is just a badly edited sentence. 011 is the prefix to dial international numbers from North America, so they probably meant "dial 9 to reach an outside line in Houston, then 011 for international".
> If you dial a 10 digit number (in North America), it's obviously destined for an outside line.
It's interesting how phone systems aren't built for this, and they do a "shortest match" algorithm, e.g. if you dial 555-4628 and there's extension 55, you'll get connected there.
I remember taking advantage of this for some free service: you could get 24 hours free trial every month if you get a token by SMS/phone call. So, I just entered an incrementing extra digit at the end of my phone number for the robot to call and read me my token, and that got me a few days of free "trial"...
>The 60-year-old said that to reach the center in Houston, orbiting astronauts have to dial 9 for an outside line, followed by 011 for an international line.
I suppose it makes sense, but there is something jarring about someone in space having to dial 9 to get an outside line. I forget that, in some sense, the ISS is a workplace, and while the view is fantastic it still isn't immune from some of the banality plaguing the rest of humanity.
Sorry for the useless nitpick but it's not so much about working place per se but rather about internal switchboard; although it usually is linked. I once rented a place here in France that was a former student building, while it was a normal apartment renting on paper/legally/technically, I still had to dial a number to reach the outside world. Fun times when your old neighbor transfer calls to you without wanting to.
That reminds me. In our student building there was an intercom on each building, and 7 or 8 students would share each apartment. I noticed that it would quietly dial the internal number for that apartment. Sure enough, dialing 9 with a DTMF tone generator would get an outside line :)
It's kind of silly; you can very easily set a PBX into a mode where any registered user handset will dial out by default, and can't use the PBX features like forwarding (but circuits created by the PBX's internal logic still can, so you don't lose features like ring pools for font-gate access.)
Now you make me curious, what do you think, is NASA's internal phone system an antiquated hack from the 1970's (which one site tells me when PABX was introduced), with old admins swearing every day that management never cared about upgrading it?
NASA was formed in the 60's, it makes me wonder what other ancient still-running tech they have there...
Nah, I'd bet that the ISS is using the very most modern tech (i.e. they're probably just forwarding a regular DTLS SIP connection to a Houston Asterisk server over a shared https://www.nasa.gov/content/dtn carrier downlink.) The ISS is designed in an extremely modular fashion; upgrading the routers in space (or any other non-essential module) is a matter of a few minutes' latching and hot-plugging.
Mind you, NASA probably can't get rid of their older tech on the ground, since there's older missions (whether in space, or just still within the mission lifetime for logistical support if re-deployment was desired) that still rely on it.
But NASA is the #1 organization in the world for big-S Systems Engineering: they know how to do hybrid deployments, live migrations, etc. The existence of a legacy peer, to NASA, isn't a constraint on new builds of local components; it's rather a stable wire protocol to build compatible emulations of, and then extend with new features to produce a new wire protocol that new ground and remote hardware can speak.
---
Regarding the dial-9 thing, though: the ISS probably has many good uses for the internal-by-default dialing scheme. I could imagine that they make all sorts of conference calls, for one thing.
I hope you're joking: there's hardly any other place where saving space is such a big priority. Surely there won't be separate bathrooms for men and women?? (And if there were, why would they be marked with the first letter of the English words instead of using language-independent icons?)
I hope that is as unbelievable as designing the phone system on the station to use “9011” to call ground control while allowing “9911” to route to some local terrestrial emergency dispatcher. Did they place 9 and 0 next to each other as well?
Indeed, it would make much more sense if dialing 911 from the ISS would contact emergency services that can deal with emergencies in space, than to route it out into Houston's emergency services.
This then begs the question, if an emergency happens in the ISS, do they call a number to Earth, and what is it?
Having attempted over the years to gently (or less so) reeducate HN as to the difference between a disclaimer and a disclosure (which somehow seem to be mostly reversed in the collective's mind), I fear you are fight a lost cause here.
Please don't do this here. Comments like this degrade the reading experience on HN. This is why you are getting downvoted. The HN crowd generally prefers more substantive comments and discourages low effort humor.
This is in good fun. What is wrong? I mean the original post is not really a Scientific Journal article. It was posted for fun. So lets have fun once in a while.
Humor's fine but the bar is high. Low-quality humor grows like crabgrass or kudzu and soon takes over. People are vigilant about not letting that happen here, not because they don't like fun, but because they've seen it happen elsewhere on the internet.
The ISS is close - only 400km above surface. The zero/low gravity doesn't come from distance, but speed. It's more like "where are you?" - "oh, travelling at 8km/s"
They use IP telephony, bounced through geosynchronous satellites like their other Internet traffic. So the best-case signal roundtrip is already close to 150000 km. I'm not sure whether standard satellite phones would work on the ISS.
BTW, is the spamcall/robocall thing a US phenomenon? I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking about those except Americans. I only get regular human telemarketers every now and then, but I generally don't answer calls from unknown numbers anyway.
My screen stopped working on my iphone a few weeks ago, and I was trying to get it to reset to see if it fixes it, and I hit the side button 5 times, triggering the call to 911.
When they answered, I said something like. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call, my phone screen stopped working and i was trying to reset it and .."
"Sir, you need to call your phone provider, not emergency services." click
We had similar things happen at a previous $work, where you needed 09 to dial out, but one of the largest cities closed by had the prefix "0911". Here in Germany, our emergency lines are 110 and 112, so if you called any "0911 2<something>" number, and forgot to add the 09 prefix, you'd be calling the fire department.
But of course, this not being from space, it's not that news worthy :-)
Similar situation here where you had to dial 9 then the number. Many employees with fast fingers who dialed long distance would find themselves accidentally double tapping the 1 and calling 911. After numerous emails and meetings they changed the dial out number to 8. No more incidents. Not news worth at all!
That brings back painful memories. 8+ years of dialing 9 to get an outside line and only 1 person had made that mistake (while trying to dial 411!) at a previous company. Then new management comes in and it happens twice in 2 days. Supposedly a huge fiasco and they started pushing to change the dial out digit immediately. Such a headache.
When we moved to a new town, when I was a kid, we learned that if a given number was free, you could request it as your phone number. But you had to know it was free by dialing it and getting a response saying so. My sister started trying memorable ones and tried [### - ### - 1234] (first 7 digits withheld for privacy reasons). That was the local fire department. 911 would have gone to the same phone.
She hastily apologized. Later she learned that "4000" was free, and my parents have used that phone number for 20 years now.
In the mid-1990s I lived in a San Jose neighborhood with underground utilities. Sometimes water would get into the phone lines and cause short circuits.
After one bad rainstorm, our phone was unusable. If you picked up the handset you would just hear a bunch of clicks.
Then two police officers knocked on the door. They said someone had called 911 from my number, they called back and no one answered, so they were required to come out and investigate.
I told them no one had called 911 and we were fine. Then it dawned on me: the clicks!
I invited them in so they could listen to the phone, and explained how old rotary dial phones work: by opening and closing the circuit once to dial a 1, twice for 2, etc. And the phone system still supported rotary dial phones.
Sure enough, with random clicks all day, the phone circuit had just happened to detect nine clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click.
Well, part of the reason. They wanted to use a number close to 0 so that it could be dialled on a rotary phone without requiring visibility. 111 was rejected for the reason of random events or faulty lines, 222 because it connected to Abbey's local exchange: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/hist...
The '9' prefix to reach an outside line likely corresponds to a specific outbound route that handles phone numbers matching a certain regex (generally length). Depending on how outbound routes were configured on the PBX a prefix might not be required for the outbound route set up with regex to match 911.
I think this is often done as a safety feature, so somebody not knowing or forgetting the exit number can still dial 911 in an emergency and reach emergency services.
I worked for a unicorn startup. We got in trouble when our SDRs (entry-level salespeople who did cold calls all day) kept accidentally calling 911. Ultimately the solution was to reprogram the phone system to allow 7 as a prefix in addition to 9.
Offtopic, but is there some malware on this website? First I was rather annoyed because there was an autoplaying video that stayed at the top of the screen covering half of it, with only a very tiny x at the top right to close it. After that chrome asked me if I want to allow the site to show notifications, but then chrome asked me to access my camera! Why on earth would a news site need access to my camera?
111 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadME: Sorry, my phone seems to be redirecting my calls. I apologize for disruption. Please don't dispatch an officer to my home.
DISPATCHER: We are definitely sending over an officer.
ME: Please don't. I'm going to get in a lot of trouble.
DISPATCHER: ... Okay, now the officer is going to check your home and verify with each member of the family that everything is alright.
My parents were not pleased to be woken up by a police officer at 2AM to check if they were okay. I got in a lot of trouble. I then called my ISP and had them add the troubled phone number to a list of non-redirecting numbers.
I believe the cell number I was calling was issued before ISPs started redirecting numbers with 911 to emergency dispatch. The redirection of my call was probably a result of my ISP implementing the redirection.
Does that for a 10 digit phone number out of 10! all possibilities, 8! are gone ?
Can there only be 3588480(10! - 8!) safe phone numbers ever ?
I'm assuming the poster had a secret extension to the existing landline, not an entirely separate line.
I wouldn't. This is how the nerdier of my friends got their computers online in the 80's.
In early modem days, a lot of people bought modems without thinking the whole process through. Once they got it home, they realized that either the room with the computer didn't have a phone line, the phone jack was inconveniently located, or after spending $300 on a 150-300 baud modem, they didn't realize they'd have to spend another $200 on a phone line + $50/month for the jack + $xx for dialtone.
Splicing phone lines and fishing them through the walls with a coat hangar became an art. And if it wasn't practical in your house, you sometimes ran a phone line through the trees to your buddy's house.
It was all very educational.
It's totally possible it was a hiccup. I had been using the line for weeks with the same number, and then it suddenly started to reliably redirect to emergency dispatch.
I thought I had read previously that numbers containing 911 would redirect in the case that a potential victim has misdialed in a hurry. This incident was over a decade ago, so its possible that I misread an article or found a garbage source.
Basically, decades ago, 411 was the first "N11" to come into common use, for "local directory assistance"; and 611 was for "repair service". But all 8 were reserved ( https://www.nationalnanpa.com/number_resource_info/n11_codes... ), and there was no way they were going to rescind all the already-existing phone numbers with "11" in them, or even with "911", since they'd been in use forever.
Some random examples of real numbers with "911" in them: 800-345-1911 is the South Hackensack office of TransAxle; 800-349-1100 is (or was) Louisiana Health Monitoring.
You are correct, I should have said handset. I'm not sure if this is common, but with the involvement of cellphones in the house my family began referring to any handset in the house as "the landline."
Example: "Can you grab the landline in the kitchen, I'm on the cell."
(edit: Actually, this doesn't take account of multiple occurrences of 911 in the number, but it's a fairly close approximation.)
Please feel free to fact check me, though.
Only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are now specifically reserved for fictional use; the other numbers have been reserved for actual assignment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)
I still have rotary phones in my house. Powderpuff blue in the kitchen. Black in my office. Goldenrod in the bedroom.
The local telco doesn't support pulse dialing anymore, but there's a guy in Australia who make a little line-powered box that translates pulses into DTMF. It even does * and #, but I forget how.
Yes. But mostly on the office phone because it slides around if I dial the numbers oriented toward the left side.
Telcos used to intentionally give people low digits to keep dialing short. The abandoning of that notion is palpable when dialing rotary today.
I wonder which actually used NANPA number is the longest to dial rotary under the current scheme.
That SHOULD be surprising, but the real surprise to me is that I had never thought about it being hard.
We live in age with enough wonders that I take them for granted. I cant decide if that is amazing or depressing.
I suspect that is because you mix up two different things: the wonders, and human nature. The wonders are amazing. That it is human nature to normalize to the point of taking them for granted might appear depressing. On the other hand, almost everything that we have normalized is mind-blowing and non-obvious when you think about it for long enough. So normalization is also a necessary coping mechanism to get stuff done.
Ham radio, on the other hand - now we would be talking significant fractions of c!
Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread that the ISS is using IP telephony over their geosynchronous satellite link. There's your latency.
> His comms slip-up set off a security alert at the Houston center, he explained, with emergency staff to check the room where the space station’s line connected to Earth.
Dialing 9 and "outside lines" implies there's some sort of PBX system, which makes sense. What I don't get though, is if the outside lines are in Houston, why do you have to dial the international access code 011 to call Houston? I thought maybe there was a country code allocated to the ISS, but according to a Reddit thread, they just use Houston numbers [1]. I think the first bit from the article is just a mistake (eg he wasn't calling a Houston number, just through Houston).
Aside, it's amazing how many (new) PBXs still use the "dial 9" requirement. If you dial a 10 digit number (in North America), it's obviously destined for an outside line. If you avoid assigning extensions that conflict with area codes, you can even use early dialing (where the call is placed as soon as a number pattern is recognized), but that's optional as the system will just wait a few seconds to see if you're dialing more digits or not. Already anyone with an extension that starts with the local area code probably already gets lots of misdialed calls since people forget to dial 9 all the time.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/56yxnd/til_t...
9 - gets him out of the internal exchange 011 - gets him out of the USA xx - country code (probably 31 for the Netherlands) then whatever other numbers are required inside the Netherlands
It's interesting how phone systems aren't built for this, and they do a "shortest match" algorithm, e.g. if you dial 555-4628 and there's extension 55, you'll get connected there.
I remember taking advantage of this for some free service: you could get 24 hours free trial every month if you get a token by SMS/phone call. So, I just entered an incrementing extra digit at the end of my phone number for the robot to call and read me my token, and that got me a few days of free "trial"...
I suppose it makes sense, but there is something jarring about someone in space having to dial 9 to get an outside line. I forget that, in some sense, the ISS is a workplace, and while the view is fantastic it still isn't immune from some of the banality plaguing the rest of humanity.
NASA was formed in the 60's, it makes me wonder what other ancient still-running tech they have there...
Mind you, NASA probably can't get rid of their older tech on the ground, since there's older missions (whether in space, or just still within the mission lifetime for logistical support if re-deployment was desired) that still rely on it.
But NASA is the #1 organization in the world for big-S Systems Engineering: they know how to do hybrid deployments, live migrations, etc. The existence of a legacy peer, to NASA, isn't a constraint on new builds of local components; it's rather a stable wire protocol to build compatible emulations of, and then extend with new features to produce a new wire protocol that new ground and remote hardware can speak.
---
Regarding the dial-9 thing, though: the ISS probably has many good uses for the internal-by-default dialing scheme. I could imagine that they make all sorts of conference calls, for one thing.
This then begs the question, if an emergency happens in the ISS, do they call a number to Earth, and what is it?
http://begthequestion.info/
> operator: "911 what is your emergency?"
> "...........Hello, I need assistance??"
> operator "Sir, Sir. Do you need help?"
> "........... YES I am here, Who is this? ......."
> operator: "Sir, we began tracing your call and are on the way.... wait... Sir what is your current location"
> "uuuummmmmm.... well about 2000 km up..... Sorry dialed the wrong number..." hung up
> operator: ".....???"
isn't day dreaming fun? LOL
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Most people overestimate how funny their comments are. scott_s said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moAqzM4ptm8
So the question is...do astronauts get 10 spam calls per day like the rest of us?
BTW, is the spamcall/robocall thing a US phenomenon? I mean, I haven't heard anyone talking about those except Americans. I only get regular human telemarketers every now and then, but I generally don't answer calls from unknown numbers anyway.
When they answered, I said something like. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call, my phone screen stopped working and i was trying to reset it and .."
"Sir, you need to call your phone provider, not emergency services." click
But of course, this not being from space, it's not that news worthy :-)
She hastily apologized. Later she learned that "4000" was free, and my parents have used that phone number for 20 years now.
"Jaa, I vaant too laage pies vit pepperuuni. Let me give yoo die oobital parametaas."
After one bad rainstorm, our phone was unusable. If you picked up the handset you would just hear a bunch of clicks.
Then two police officers knocked on the door. They said someone had called 911 from my number, they called back and no one answered, so they were required to come out and investigate.
I told them no one had called 911 and we were fine. Then it dawned on me: the clicks!
I invited them in so they could listen to the phone, and explained how old rotary dial phones work: by opening and closing the circuit once to dial a 1, twice for 2, etc. And the phone system still supported rotary dial phones.
Sure enough, with random clicks all day, the phone circuit had just happened to detect nine clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click.
If ‘9’ gets you an outside line, then you miss the ‘0’, the number seen by the telco starts ‘11...’
Maybe the pbx is programmed to recognise ‘911’ and dial that, without requiring an outside line?
I think this is often done as a safety feature, so somebody not knowing or forgetting the exit number can still dial 911 in an emergency and reach emergency services.
I've seen PBXs set up this way in past.