Here is what gets me. It's hard to keep up with what area codes need to be dialed (ok, toned). If I get a recording telling me not to use the area code, they could have just as easily made it ring through either way!
I complained about that a long time ago.
Also the recording says......you need (or don't need) to dial a 1 before making this call. They could just ask to confirm you want to make a long distance call, and put the call through anyway. It would keep you from having to redial the number.
Some 15 years ago, I made a repair at the home of a woman and her mother. The woman was 70 and her mother was 100 years of age. They had a 1948 Western Electric rotary dial phone with cloth cords that they were still paying rent on to Bell South.
TDD
Beginning this year they made us add the area code for a *local* call! Dialing my neighbor across the street I now have to punch in 10 digits.
Bastards.
Jon
That is why they invented "speed dial" Two or 3 punches and you have it done.
I used to travel frequently to Japan. I wondered why we didn't implement changes to fill the need for numbers as simply as they did.
They have essentially the same system as the US where 3 digits are the exchange and the next 4 digits are a phone number in that exchange.
When they started running out of numbers they increased the numbers per exchange from 4 to 5 places. Existing numbers were given the prefix 3. So 999-1111 became 999-31111. That added almost 90,000 numbers per exchange without needing to do confusing stuff like area code overlays where now your neighbor can be in a different area code.
I was pleased when we went to a 10 digit number because that included us in the Atlanta calling area. Back in the old days, BBSs (and anything interesting) were long distance.
404 was the Atlanta area code and the new area changed from 404 to 770.There was a big deal about local businesses having to change their area code on business cards and signs and things. The solution they came up with was to leave Atlanta as 404 and give the outside area
770.What they should have done was give businesses 404 and let residences use 770. That way, you would automatically have known which people had what area code. The way it is, you just had to guess what numbers switched area codes and which stayed the same.
But no one called me and asked me. :)
I remember back some years ago when they had the old rotary dial phones, that they had some without the dialer. They were used in some office buildings where the public had access, like maybe a waiting room at a doctors office. I'd be pretty sure they still make such a thing in a more modern design. I'd call a store that specializes in phones. You're not going to find this at Walmart or Target. Maybe Radio Shack, if there's no phone specialty store nearby.
Why would you check with the phone company about anything, you are in a health care facility -- you check with the facility administrator or business office to see what THEY allow inside their facility...
As others here have said, you will be an extension on the facilities PBX phone system... Now whether or not you can call directly to that extension from the outside world which is called Direct Inward Dialing or you have to be connected through a receptionist or auto attendant so your call can be filtered based on the hour or so they can keep track of who is calling in and not allow random phone calls through is another issue entirely...
With PBX systems you are sometimes limited by what kind and type of phone you can use at each extension... Many modern PBX systems are entirely digital (even ones that aren't VoIP) and require special telephone sets to be used and you can not use a standard telephone set with them... You have to ask what sort of phone you will need to supply to use with the system and if a telephone is included and provided when you pay the fee...
The advice you were offered about reversing the leads on the phone to disable the keypad would work if you were using 25 year old phones on a telco provided Centrex system -- however the likelihood of a health care facility still using such a system is very small... All new phones have diode bridges in them which can overcome the reverse polarity issue and newer PBX systems are all digital making using a standard phone at the extension location moot...
~~ Evan
That happened because your neighbors did not want to give up their existing area code when the number of customers exceeds the available phone numbers.
Instead of splitting up the subscribers into 2 area codes with half of them getting a new area code they just interspersed new and old in the same area meaning you have to dial all 10 numbers. Here they gave us a choice and we went with taking a new area code and the 7 digit dial. Since then my AC has changed twice (813, 941 and now
239) but within the 239 area, it is a 7 digit dial to get me.
Aye, the thing is that they already did the area code split about 10 or so years ago. Portland got to keep the area code once shared by the entire state, and the rest of us got stuck with the new one.
Now they spring the 10 digit crap on us. It's just no fun anymore.
Jon
Yeah, but I end up fumblefingering the phone too much to make that worthwhile. Plus it's just one more thing to have to remember.
I am, however, tempted to route the phone through an old modem, and have the computer do the dialing for me. That worked out splendedly the last time I had it hooked up that way.
Jon
If there's one thing I've learned about the phone company, it is that they will never tell you when any particular charge or fee has become outmoded.
Bastards.
Jon
Not always true. Yeah, they did charge rent for years, but a couple 3-4 years after letting people buy out their phones for around 30 bucks, IIRC, they simply abandoned all the others in place. Didn't have much choice, really- the WE plant had closed, and they no longer had an operation in place to recycle them with fresh plastic and stuff. So if a renter returned one, they couldn't do anything with it.
I'm old fashioned- I like WE phones, and detest the lightweight crap issued since then. Glad I have a crate of real phones in the basement. I used to pull them out of the trash at the apartments, or buy them for a buck at garage sales, but haven't seen any in the last 2-3 years.
There are over 400 for sale on Ebay tonight and a lot of the more recent ones are at $10 with no bids.
I still see them in garage sales for a buck or make offer. I have a stack of them too and 5 are connected (one is a pay phone) one still has the original TelCo phone number tag with my current number on it. (different area code tho). That was a rotary phone that was in the house when I bought it 27 years ago. It is hooked up in the garage. In true "illegal phone" tradition, only one of them rings ;-)
It was like that up in Philadelphia PA NW sub, suburbs for at least 10 years. I liked that better than here in east TN. Here sometimes you dial a 1 then the area code, and other calls you can not dial the one before the area code or you get a recording. If it was all the same that would be great. Who knows, how low until they add another digit to phone numbers?
I don't understand the last sentence?
I love it when you dial a 1 before a "local area code" (like 602 from
480) and are basically told "f*ck you, try again and forget the 1, you should know what area codes we aren't handing off to your long distance carrier..."Those days are gone for me. I put pbxinaflash onto a retired p4 computer and now I pay $5/mo for the house phone plus about a penny/minute for outgoing calls. I can have multiple simultanious calls and it screens out all incoming autodialed calls by requiring human inteligence (press "5" to complete an incoming call). The latter reason was the primary reason for the setup. I'm to lazy to do anything much fancier than the default setup but some added perks include call logs, the ability to record everything, and messages forwarded to me as emails that I can pick up on my smart cellphone.
BTW: I can set up any dialing rules I want. Press a 7 or 10 digit number with or without a 1 and it just dials it. All circuits busy with one carrier? It'll use a fallback.
It was once illegal or at least not sanctioned by Ma Bell for an individual customer to attach anything to phone company lines. Believe it or not, at one time, you could not buy a telephone at your local drug store. Phone service was essentially one big monopoly controlled by The Bell System.
TDD
Tony wrote: (snip)code tho). That was a rotary phone that
In the old days, with the relatively high-draw mechanical ringers, they could put a meter across your line and see how much juice it drew when the ring tone was sent. Look on the bottom of a modern throw-away phone for the Ringer Equivalence Number (REN)- it is usually about 0.65 or so, as compared to 1.0 for a real phone. And if Ma Bell was suspicious, she could figure out how many you had. Standard home POTS line, if you put too many phones on, none would ring. So people with bootleg phones would disconnect the ringers on the 'extra' ones.
There was a day when repeatedly getting caught with bootleg phones would get your service terminated. And since you could only get phones from the phone company, you were presumed to be holding stolen property. (For Ma Bell, at least, it said it was theirs right on it.) For a few years after the judge said the phone company had to allow customer-owned equipment, they were still allowed to require one phone-company owned phone per line. So a lot of small businesses who were early adopters for having their own phone system, would have a board on the basement wall with a 'real' wall phone for each line, never used.
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