News: 1592809271

Have you got a fax number instead?

Mine is out of magenta ink, so it won't send.

The fingers you are using to mash the keyboard are too large, please consider using a stylus, or the eraser end of a pencil for precise keying, Thanks!

Managed to call the cops by mistake when calling back to the UK from our US office. I dialled 9 to get an outside line then 11 for the UK. The US emergency number is 911.

I realised and hung up, but they still arrived in force at the front door. Red face.

Are you sure? The UK country code is 44..

In the North American calling zone 11 is the international prefix, the 44 would then follow.

001 = USA

011 = NL

Isn't the US's international prefix 011 rather than 11?

It's (or was) 011 for international, then the country code and the number.

So for a UK number, you'd dial 011-44-[the UK number]

Of course, if you're behind a PBX, all bets are off. But that's the way it used to work on my landline.

112 - the UK and EU harmonised emergency services number - is embarrassingly close to 111 for the NHS non-emergency helpline.

I have never understood why they reserved the entire 0112 block to avoid accidental calls but then allowed that 'stubby fingers' mistake to happen.

Well, I called 112 by accident once.

I was trying to call an internal extension number stating with 112. Usually you would dial 0 beforehand for an outside line or the extension number directly for an internal one. Only I wasn't using my own phone but the one on a trader's desk. As they would primarily call clients, their phones were configured to call outside lines by default.

A pretty pissed emergency operator lambasted my for trying to speak to a "Javier", insistently, as he was known to be a kind of a joker and I didn't believe it wasn't him answering his phone.

Own PEBKAC goal...

I thought the emergency number was now 0118 999 88199 9119 725…3

In what illegitimised system do you dial "11" for the UK?

AT&T is the illegitimised system.

In the US, to dial a local number, it's just the local number (555-1234). To dial long distance, you put a 1 in front of the area code (1-555-555-1234). To dial internationally, you put 011 in front of the country code (011-044-...)

Back in the day, most UK exchanges reserved '8' and '9' for local dialling codes, to dial nearby exchanges by prefixing a phone number with '91' or '87' etc. You could daisy-chain them to a degree, so '991' might take you to nearby town (9) and then on to a close-by village (91). Although the full emergency number was '999' a few very small exchanges had limited connectivity so that '99' was enough to reach the emergency services. It didn't take much misconfiguration of autodiallers to trigger a visit from the local plod asking why you kept calling them and making strange beeping noises...

Back in the day i heard about a phone hack where a public uk phone box could give you free calls by dialling 99 then using a tone dialer held to the reciever and dialling the number you wanted. Believe it or not you could get free unlimited global calls...

I got caught out by 555XXXX. It is (almost) OK for preventing accidental calls in the US (a few numbers have been assigned from that range). The if some website insists on a telephone or mobile number without a good reason, try one of [1]these . Anyone know where I can find a list of premium rate numbers for charities?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number#United_Kingdom

Excellent suggestion.

The 555 exchange was the imaginary exchange for US TV shows.

Once had a fax try repeatedly to connect to my parent's house number. Drove us all mad (I was living at home at the time).

After a day or so of constant calls and no way to trace them, and before I could cobble up a fax modem to do what it was supposed to, we called BT and had them intercept the line. Weirdly, they claimed the only way to trace it was to take over our entire phone line for the whole day and we'd receive no calls whatsoever... kind of a self-imposed DoS.

Anyway, they intercepted the line. And then gave a phone call to a nice chap working in a central bank who was faxing incredibly sensitive documents to what he thought was another central bank, but was in fact our home number. The BT guy took a certain amount of joy in explaining it all to us, not least because said bank needed to then contact us to ask us to please, please, please never reveal what had happened and to destroy anything that we'd received (I was so annoyed that I couldn't get the fax modem working - think of the extortio.... I mean reward!).

We eventually got our phone line back, a grovelling apology, and never did get another fax call.

The days before 1471 one assumes.

I think the phone number was only a fax system, so when you called it back, all you got was a fax tone and nothing else.

BT Openreach can still do the same, although for us was about 10 minutes (Checking our external phone numbers for lines coming into out buildings, a little old lady picked up on one of the numbers. After apologising for getting a wrong number tried again and the same lady picked up. Confirmed the number I dialed which she confirmed wasn't her number. Got Open Reach to check, however never found out why it happened as obviously it had fixed itself by the time they had arrived)

A 36k speed demon had the software for faxing. Used have my dad getting very smug over being able to fax orders through to local suppliers on the rare occasion he couldn't be bothered to ring them instead.

I've even got a few machines with modems built in kicking around (an old vaio and lenovo) so I could still have some fun with the stuff now (software permitting).

I'm still running an active Hylafax connected to a USB fax modem (hard to find non-winmodems, but boot sales are very useful!).

Granted, we've not had a fax in years, but the system is still there and works. Users just "print" to Winprint Hylafax Client printer (freeware), it gets sent over the network to the Hylafax server, gets queued and sent out as appropriate, and then the user gets an email confirmation with PDF attachment of what they sent.

Incoming faxes do the same in reverse, popping a PDF attachment to an email to a given email address. For the last 2 years, it was nothing but spam-faxes, so nobody even bothers to check any more.

But it's a fun afternoon project, but definitely a dying technology.

When I worked for the local phone company, we would get vendors that called in to help them with their connection to our network. Many of them were clueless. So, a common thing I would do is:

"What's your fax number?"

"Why?"

"I want to send you some documentation."

"Ok. It's ......."

So I draw them a picture and fax it to them. It's insulting, but they never really caught onto it.

That reminds me of an incident that happened in my office back in the early 00's.

one of our users was trying to send a fax, and as the fax lines all went via the PABX they has to start the number they were calling with 9 prefix, for an outside line.

They later confessed they were having a bad day and jabbed the 9 multiple times, something along the lines of "Press 9 (jab) for an outside (jab) effing (jab) line (jab).

They did not realise the fax was diligently recording each key press, and so when it dialled the number it went straight to 999. The user oblivious to what was happening just saw the fax had failed to send and walked away in frustration. The fax machine just did what was expected of it and kept redialling every 10 mins trying to make a connection...

Not long after a Police car turned up at the office with a very irate PC demanding we turn the "bloody fax machine off". Thankfully I wasn't involved in the "fact finding enquiry" that took place but I did see it happening and there was nothing humorous about it...at the time.

I can't remember the model but we had a Castelle FaxPress.

Was in the rack forever along with Rational Networks (Might have the wrong name) 24 port 56k dial in appliance.

I remembered the time I had to use a fax years ago. Thing is noone of the modems had any fax functionality. Not one on my thinkpad as well. I had to dig around internet to find a place to send a fax.

Fax...for when you want to send a slow, low resolution, black and white copy of an document you could easily have scanned and attached to an email.

Nearly 10 years ago, I moved to a new company. We were busy tidying up all the IT infrastructure (way too many clunky and old physical servers doing menial tasks). I was given the task of virtualising the fax server. It wasn't used much any more for obvious reasons, but was still required occasionally.

All seemed straightforward until I realised that HyperV doesn't support (or at least didn't then) the connecting of physical serial ports on the host to a guest VM. I ended up cobbling together a solution using a couple of freebie tools (com0com and hub2com) to create a virtual com port on the guest which tunnelled the serial data to a specific port on the network. The same tool running on the host intercepted that network port and routed the data back to the physical serial port on the machine (where the fax modem was connected).

And it worked as well! I was always quite proud of that little workaround.

If you need telephone numbers as placeholders, it's perhaps worth looking at [1]this page

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/information-for-industry/numbering/numbers-for-drama

My desk phone number was one digit away from that of the Swallow Hotel, Leeds. There were some very tedious mornings as a result of that.

I knew someone whose surname began with the letters TAZ. Used to get really fed up at chucking-out time on a Friday when the drunks tried to find "TAXI" in the phone book...

When I used to run my own business our phone number was a single digit substitution away from a local "massage" parlour. We would (too) often get calls requesting details of services and prices we offered (those were the better calls), or how much for massage with happy ending, bare-back without, and other services not provided by a small software consultancy. I now know more about that line of "business" than I would like... (Gimp mask icon for obvious reasons)

'When I used to run my own [software consultancy] business our phone number was a single digit substitution away from a local "massage" parlour'

"Hi, do you agile spurts, or do you follow the waterfall model?"

Many moons ago I ran a fairly busy modem BBS and one of the magazines of the time had a nice big review of it - sadly printing the wrong phone number. Unfortunately it was for an old dear down the road. It was Hull Telephones at the time and I never did find out how they resolved the problem of her no-stop disturbances, I can only think of giving her a new number.

Going back 40 years when you could use the office phone for limited personal calls, we used to get a piece of paper monthly with all of the personal calls made from the office. You work out with your office mate whose calls were whose, and pay the money into an honesty box.

One number was being called about 20 times a week, for about 2 minutes a time - even when I was away from the office. My colleague, Martin, denied it was him. so we phoned the number. The conversation went as follows "Hello xxxx building society", "Er hello mum, it's Martin, sorry, wrong number"

The company shall remain nameless, but back in the day, when mobiles were no as ubiquitous around the world as they are now, it was common to use a Sat phone. mobile > Sat phone was even more expensive than Mobile > landline > Sat phone, and it was easier to keep tract of the costs.

Imagine the suprise when the Bill that came in was HUGE! tracing thought the logs to find out who had made all the calls showed that it was in fact a local landline number.

At the time the Sky (Satellite TV) used to have to "phone home" to make sure of your subscription. Or people would buy a cracked on from the back of a van that would phone a random number that in this case ......

I think they ended up putting pin codes on it after that.

Where those noises really come from, as revealed on Monkey Dust.

https://youtu.be/dTos3CsvnLQ

Our fax machines would sometimes mysteriously dial the lines of customers who'd been particularly obnoxious/ranty/threaty to us. Never figured out why.

Our home telephone number is very close to the local branch of the Nat West bank. Some years ago, before internet banking, we kept getting messages on our answerphone from an old gent wanting some information about his current account.

Eventually, expressing real urgency, he left a message and gave his name, address, account number and pin number.....

We were so concerned, I rang the bank directly, explained what had happened and asked them to get in touch with the poor guy and perhaps remind him to safeguard his details over the phone. As you will understand, it took ages for the bank to grasp the issue. I'm sure the guy would have believed me if I had returned his call but that would not necessarily have sorted the problem or alerted the bank.

We didn't get any more calls from him. I only hope scammers never found him; they would these days.

...for Sharp Electronics UK.

Bearing in mind this was the -very- early 90's and home faxes were still new and to some folks, genuinely space-age.

I genuinely had to speak to customers (often of a more elderly persuasion) to explain one of two things: no, it really has sent it, even if you have the original in your hand (they honestly believed it somehow sent the original like a letter! Or (far more commonly) no, there is nothing wrong with either fax - try turning the one you're sending over...when they called to complain it was just blank at the receiving end.

You used to be able to put them into a diagnostics mode as well and one of the tests was the fax tones. I was so practiced, I could tell a duff modem chip just by the slight change in the warble.

Oh and then there was the time the MD brought a box in, plonked it on my desk and told me he'd told his mate I could fix his fax machine for him...he'd dropped it down several flights of concrete stairs.

The "repaired" one he got was made mostly of scavenged parts from previously scrapped units.

I had to support fax machines , along with the pcs, right up to a couple of years ago.

Out of the hundreds of calls there was rarely anything wrong , it was always them dialling the wrong number , or the other number not answering OR in fact the other number not sending.

People just dont realise they are making a phone call , and there are some easy diagnostics they can do themselves, like "does that number look like a phone number???" or try ringing it from a normal phone.

Although , in the user's defence , I once saw a hideous looking error on the little LCD , totally incomprehensible jargon , that after some googling i discovered meant "out of paper"

Ah yes... I'd forgotten the "it doesn't go" errors - most of which, as you say, were down to things like the person trying to send a fax to a phone or my personal favourite on a line that did both, the receiving person either picking the phone up and not then pressing start on their fax machine, or despite being told "I am about to send you a fax" not setting the machine to answer.

Ahh happier, simpler times.

So cmon, who still has to deal with these things in 2020?

I know they're out there , due to various luddites refusing to move on . I bet most Builders supplies stores have them.

This nhs trust I'm at is on a big push to get rid , but im not sure if they've done it yet.

And theyll still have virtual ones. in fact , yup , just checked my printer collection . I ve got a fax machine right here , in the long list of "shit that isnt actually a printer" in the "Printers and scanners" thingy

I bought a brand new Brother laser printer a few weeks ago. It has a fax function, even came with a phone cord.

Until I retired a couple of years ago the computer company RM required a fax to place an order.

We still often make purchases through SAP that go to fax machines. I suspect most companies have switched to digital "fax" machines (create PDF instead of printing a page), but I've had a vendor tell me their fax machine has been having problems, or someone grabbed the wrong page from it, etc. They're still in use.