Starter Doorknob

[Dean Hoffman]

From the Onion.

[micky]

My house came with starter doorknobs. The house was 4 years old and had all its original doorknobs, but they were plastic.

On top of that, the prior owner had painted some of them for some reason. They looked terrible. (He also caulked windows all over the place and did a terrible job, far too much caulk.) The caulk I scraped or cut off, but the doorknobs looked too hard to clean so I was going to replace them with nice brass ones. But then I didn't want to replace them all, or have some that didn't match the others. So I found the only place in Baltimore that sold these things (Not a hardware store. I forget what it was) and I bought several and he threw in the whole rest of his stock, about 5 more including some already broken.

I replaced all the painted ones and life was good for 38 years, but just this past winter, I put a tiny bit of extra force on one and a part inside broke, so the knob comes off. It's my bedroom door that I never close anyhow.

But this is why you have to be careful with starter doorknobs.

[micky]

The photo says "text Rump to [a 5-digit number]. How does that work? Does the 5 digit number match up with one particular person or business? Are 5 digits enough for the whole country?

In this case** it's probably automated and whatever one texts it just puts you on the subscription list for texts from him, is that right?

But if you text something other than Rump, will that still subscribe you? Or, can you text insults to the same number and someone will read them?

**This question is not just about stumpie but about the whole system where you text something to a 5-digit number.

[Cindy Hamilton]

The five-digit number is an SMS short code.

[micky]

Thanks. This is the very first info I've gotten about this, and I have been wondering. It's a good think I didn't send insults to stumpie. I'd be on his list and I'm not one of the 91% it says want to be on text lists.

[Jim Joyce]

Here's one such list of SMS/text short codes. If you're curious, see if your code is in that list.

Similarly, phone numbers have had short codes for a couple of decades, at least, sometimes dialed as #xxx, as opposed to star codes, which are dialed as *xx.

[micky]

Very intersting.