Starting to think that the skill of dialing a phone number is not what it used to be. Few of us actually dial 10-digit phone numbers anymore, right? By extension few of us receive phone calls as a result of someone dialing a wrong number. My insight into the lost art of dialing a phone number comes from my kiosk antics, which involve dialing a phone number. The number connects to a conference call from which I can blast any noise or sound I want. Lately it’s been the Mister Softee jingle, and it might stay that way for the foreseeable future, but I’ve blasted shortwave radio numbers stations, my piano music, WBAI, etc. The day after Joe Frank died I played his Black Hole as my little tribute, though unfortunately I don’t think the sound from that program carried well enough for anyone to realize it was playing. Maybe that’s appropriate in some way.
When the conference call ends I get an e-mail listing the phone numbers of everyone who called, the time they stayed connected, etc. I had been deleting them unread since I assumed all the calls were from me, though it was sometimes interesting to note how widely the duration of the calls varied. Some kiosks disconnect after a few minutes, other stay on for 55 minutes, still others play for up to 4 hours, which seems to be a standard VOIP hard limit on call length.
So over the weekend I received three of these summary e-mails in a row showing that someone from a 917 phone number had called thrice, the calls lasting 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 1 minute. Only once had I seen anyone but I call in to the conference, that being a woman in Tennessee whose full identity and information were easy to find just by looking up her phone number. I was more intrigued by these three-in-a-row calls because the number lead to someone who works at an Internet and technology security company. I imagined, not without reason, that CityBridge was one of his company’s clients and he was investigating a high number of lengthy phone calls to a North Dakota phone number going out over their network.
But I also thought that if this was any reputable security goon’s way of “investigating” such a thing he chose a pretty gumshoe way to do it, using what appeared to be his personal cell phone with no caller ID obfuscation. CityBridge does not state specifically if it monitors its phone traffic but they did tell the New York Times that the most-called number from their kiosks is the New York state food stamp hotline. If they have that information handy what’s to stop them from dishing the least called numbers or the top ten? Clearly they keep logs of what numbers are called. That doesn’t surprise me as much as how willing they were to reveal such details of what numbers get called the most. Logging phone numbers called might seem a little weird but my understanding is that the old payphone owners did the same thing.
Anyway, a few other stray calls into the conference had me thinking the number I use had gotten around and that others within CityBridge were checking in on it. But now I doubt such a thing. The block of phone numbers assigned to conference calls are consecutive, as I discovered last night and should have taken into consideration earlier. I dialed a wrong number last night, replacing a 0 with a 7, and connected to some random conference with no one else in it. These are 10-digit numbers that people actually have to dial and on account of that and the lost art of dialing phone numbers it should not be a surprise that people land in the wrong conferences.
But I was getting a little paranoid about it, enough to where I was going to change the way I do this a little. But no. It actually makes me want to dial in to random conferences and see what’s going on. Hah. It also makes me think that nefarious minds might try and do something subversive with the numbers of the people who called in. I’m not going to do that.
