In the UK, at least, you needed an extra digit (usually '9') to obtain an outside line. So emergency calls would be 9999 not 999, and no internal extensions could begin with a 9.

My old work use the European emergency number (112) for their emergency number on the landlines. Although at first it seems like a dumb idea at first it makes sense as they have their own Fire Brigade (including ambulance) onsite who are a lot nearer than the public ones. Moreover, the fire(wo)men are specially trained and equipped for chemical incidents.

We have the same at our workplace. Add to the fact that our site is "secure" (for a given definition of secure), and if an ambulance or fire engine just rocked up, they'd be very much delayed by security, if security are not aware of an incident going on...

So emergency calls would be 9999 not 999

This isn't true. Because of the next part...

and no internal extensions could begin with a 9.

The reason no internal extensions can begin with 9 is precisely for this reason! You wouldn't want people being confused in an emergency about needing to prefix it with some extension.

It is true that for dialling external numbers you usually need a prefix but this doesn't apply to emergency calls.

And just continuing to bash 9 won't prevent you from getting through either.

Every system I've set up (and I've done quite a lot) has had a config item for emergency numbers such that they will automatically go to an outside line (and a specific one where applicable - eg landline vs voip) but also will cut off an existing call if all trunks are in use to ensure the emergency call goes through.

PBX and the public telephone used to use exactly the same electromechanical systems.

The PBX would have an "external mode" relay triggered by 9. That would literally "pick up" the external phone line and connect your circuit to the public telephone.

You would pick up the phone, hear the internal dial tone, then dial 9, wait for the external dial tone* (which sounded a little different), and finally dial 999 or 911.

If you didn't dial 9 first, then it was physically impossible for any of your digits to reach the outside world.

* I suspect you probably didn't actually need to wait as the relays were very fast compared to the reset time of a rotary phone (that the later button phones emulated), but we were always told to do so.

Local village phone numbers were four digits and you had to dial 99x to select one of the other villages. Each 9 took you closer to emergency services so from some locations you had to dial 9x for another village or you would get to the emergency operator. Dialing from a phone box you did not know could easily lead to a wrong number.

My grandparent's phone number ended in two 9s. One day I dialed a 3rd one. My excuse is I was only 7 and the operator at the other end of the phone was very kind.

For this reason I've heard that internal phone systems are often programmed to route 99 to emergency services.

On a sinister note I seen to recall one mobile phone (may have been an early iPhone) tired the emergency dial codes for a large range of countries to the local emergency number automatically ... seemed a good idea until it was found one of the UK mobile companies had the same number for it's voice mail as some obscure Asian country

Even if you just dial 999 it'll take you through to the emergency services.

Not any more, most modern systems do not need a prefix to be dialled for external calls.

Best practice for phone systems is use 4 digit extensions.

If the customer insists on 3 digits, ensure numbers are all between 200 and 899 to avoid any conflicts with emergency services/special numbers such as 101, 105, 109, 111 etc.

William should have sent a Bill to his underling...

Young Bill or Old Bill?

I'm going to cop out of answering that

So this was an internal phone system? How did they dial external numbers - there is usually a prefix so maybe 0, meaning someone on the internal system wanting to dial 911 would dial 0-911 not just 911. Otherwise there would be no way to dial ANY external number!

So this is likely a fake story, and not even that interesting - just like most of the recent ones even if they were real. Used to enjoy this column, sadly no longer, let it die please

I fully expect the will be some trolls and keyboard warriors who will post some really clever abuse, feel free, I am sure it makes you feel like a real tough…

my internal works system reconises a 01/07 or other long strings and dials direct, no prefix.

But that does not mean it would recognise a number beginning with a 9 which is the whole basis of the "story", so they must have a prefix character.

In the UK, national telephone numbers generally have a builtin prefix, 0, which telephone systems can use to distinguish internal and external calls. This is not the case in many countries.

However, even in the UK, some valid numbers are harder to distinguish from an extension: 101, 111, 112, 123, for example. And 999, of course.

And, although landlines are increasingly historic anomalies, you ought, technically, to be able to dial a number local to your PABX by omitting the dialling code altogether.

I can believe it. I set up an Asterisk VOIP system many years ago and 999 (UK) was a special number in the route. The idea was that in a real emergency, people forget to dial 9 or 0 for an outside line and revert to their primary instincts.

I thought the story would go the other way - someone wanted to dial the internal extension 911 and got the emergency services instead.

this is likely a fake story

I do enjoy this column but have to say I'm pretty certain some of them are fabricated.

If somebody had gone through a hiring process and was tasked with working on a phone system there's a good chance they'd understand the significance of 911.

Sure mistakes happen but some of these are clearly BS.

Some people blindly follow processes without thinking as they can't do strategic thought. for some jobs like in a regulated industry this is great; but in others it is less good.

I used to work in a research IT office where the science moves fast and the IT struggles to keep up. We took on a guy with lots of experience on the regulated side of the industry and he struggled because he needed the guidance of a well-defined rigid process...

Totally agree, just wondering what grounds anyone would have to give your post a thumbs down - I assume that the number of t rolls on this site is growing, giving a thumbs down for a comment like this makes no sense!!!

Naïve cynicism

I have worked in telecoms for a while and this is VERY believable. And do not underestimate the abilities of the 'cisco certified engineer' left to set up a call manager system in interesting ways.

I can't remember the syntax but you can set the digit analysis to use the next digits in the called number, or if it CONTAINS a given digit string.

Here in the UK we use 999 and 112 (112 was a pan European thing, but not sure if all UK networks supported it due to high level of mis-dials it got)

So it was not unknown for the 'engineer', being very diligent in making sure they will never fail an emergency call, to set up the call manager so ANY dialled number CONTAINING either 112 or 999 will be routed as an emergency call.

So from a busy bank, or network of travel agents, that is quickly a lot of calls. Which in turn generates quite a lot of interest.

Then we had to try to explain to these certified engineers they probably had got it wrong, when as an uncertified no-one I was clearly talking nonsense. Until they checked and quietly corrected it (if you were lucky)...

Maybe they do dial something like 0 or * to get an outside line, but if something's happening and someone needs to call 911, details like that are often neglected in the heat of the moment. Any sensible system would have an override for 911 or whatever the local emergency number is that reroute the call appropriately regardless of the rules for getting an outside line.

I lived in a college at an Australian University back in the early 2000's (that would be onsite House of Residences, I think for our American cousins).

Every room had a 4 digit phone number (e.g. 1327), dial that from an inhouse phone, and you would get the relevant person. Dialling a 1 first also got you an external line - but since external numbers are all much longer than 3 digits, it rarely caused problems (unless a person wanted to dial externally, but was too slow getting passed the 3rd digit!).

Anyway, one day when I was in a bit of a hurry and I needed to call the College Admin Office, but couldnt remember the number off hand, so I took a guess and typed in 1000. For the uninitiated, in Australia the emergency number is 000. Yep you guessed it, cue an answer from the Emergency Services, a hurried apology from myself, and a quickly ended call. I then took the time to find out the correct number for the Admin Office - 1001.

I believe they changed the system to require a 9 for external dialling the next year, after a few people complained...

We did that once in France as kids. In the UK there used to be a number which immediately rang the line back (IIRC 171) and as kids we thought this was hilarious. We tried it in a French phone box and it went straight through to the cops (17) which required some explanation...

This is a very common issue. In the Netherlands emergency services use 112, so it won't take long for this issue to show up if you start assigning from the default 100.

I usually start counting from 200 simply to prevent this issue, because if you have extension 111 and 113 it's easy to misdial, and after a couple of times you start to piss off emergency services.

A note on external numbers: for emergency numbers your PBX should have special rules to automatically route emergency numbers to the right place, bypassing any other extensions. In case of emergency anyone, even people unfamiliar with your phone system, should be able to dial the emergency number they are familiar with, without external extension.

Another consideration, especially where a lot of foreigners are expected (hotels, for example), you should add some common foreign extensions such as 911 and 999 and route them to the proper one.

These days this should be done at the provider level, though, but having it routed externally without outside line extension is still a good idea.

Many modern PBX systems don't need a prefix anymore either, they detect this automatically based on number length etc.

I believe Panasonic systems have had options to program this as far back as i can remember (the oldest i've worked with is probably a TDA-100 from the early 2000's)

We have the socialized medicine but that’s just the medical, not the emergency transport. If you call an ambulance that’s a $500 bill (but if you have extended health, like with an employment plan, I think it might be covered — maybe).

I forget what the fire truck cost, for a while the emergency alarm was getting false triggers & not only was it a nuisance to the whole facility (because everybody had to evacuate & then appear at muster to attend the roll call) but the cost was not insubstantial.

I heard that you could turn on any deactivated cell phone in Canada, with no sim whatsoever, and they are all able to connect to 911. It’s like some parents would relent to providing their kids a cellular “for emergency purposes,” and that’s how they did it. You couldn’t use the phone for NOTHING, except the emergency. And then, you can use public wi-fi and free VOIP (Fongo) and free SMS (TextNow), not to mention the likes of Blackberry Messaging and iPhone messaging: all of a sudden paid cellular isn’t particularly relevant anymore.

If I remember correctly, in Aus, if the fire truck turns up for a proper fire, it doesnt cost anything. But if it's a false alarm (i.e. some drunk pushing the fire alarm button, because they thought it would be funny), then it costs a LOT, my memory says A$2000 each time... The Firies, really dont like having their time wasted...

I was doing a lot of travelling to a small city (Nagano) in Japan. This was 25 years ago when you had to take the telephone phone line and plug it into your laptop. We used the AT&T dialer, so you had a freephone local number to phone home and so no charge to me. Every where else it worked fine. In Nagano I got a fax machine. I had to phone back to the UK using the international number rather than use the dialer (and got the hotel markup on the cost of the phone call)

I reported the problem saying phoning from Nagano. The report came back - it works.

I tried it again - it still didn't work.

I reported it again. The report came back - it works.

I raise another report saying You have been testing the Nagano phone number.. 12345789?

The report came back - fixed. The guy on the help desk had been testing the local number for Tokyo, and not Nagano.

My £1000 (about £10,000 today) phone bill was queried - but I gave them the reports I had raised, and my boss said I should do more customer work, than worry about the money.

Decades ago, I worked for a company in the UK (probably now absorbed and/or defunct) that wrote outbound dialler software. The user would provide it with a list of numbers to call and then it would take a number from the queue and attempt to dial it. If the call wasn't picked up, the number would be put on the retry queue for later. Relatively simple stuff.

The problem was this: when the number was taken from the queue, we'd put the configured outside line prefix (usually a '9') on the front before dialling. Then, if the call wasn't picked up, *that* number (including the 9) would be put on the retry queue. When we grabbed a number from the retry queue, we'd put the outside line prefix on it -- again.

As I'm sure you've worked out by now, after a few attempts, every number in the retry queue would start with '999', which would have resulted in us spamming UK emergency services with calls as fast as we could dial them (which, in the end, depended on how many external lines were connected to the switch).

Fortunately, we discovered this bug in pretty short order, while we were still developing against the test switch, and before it had any real outside lines connected to it. It got fixed before the end of the day, and the engineer responsible had a good story to tell in the pub after work (and had to buy the first round, obviously).

They say they allocate ranges to each office and leave gaps between them, but happens if say you allocate 100-199 to sales and 200-299 to accounting and the company grows enough that they need more than 100 numbers for sales? After 199 they'll have to skip to a new range, which defeats the point of having the ranges ("I see the number starts with 2, this person calling me must be in accounting")

Unless this was a really tiny company, where the they had like 10 numbers in each range and the idea of growing so much one office could have 100 people was unthinkable, you'd hope they'd want something more future proof. I've dealt with internal systems that used 4 (usually) and some that used 5 numbers for internal calls. Never seen one that used 3. Maybe that's because I never consulted for small companies, but the hardship of hitting one more button outweighs the hassle of having to change things later if the company grows too much.

Seems to me that Chuck should have asked "Hey, if my extension is 911 how does anyone really dial 911?"

I worked in a large tower block hospital during the late 80's. The health and safety people were very worried about fires in tower block hospitals, they are hard to evacuate quickly. (Like Grenfell Tower but with patients). There was system in place that if you discovered a fire, you pick up any phone and dial extension 888 and it would automatically set off all the alarms, everybody would rush to their evacuation procedures and the fire brigade would send everything they had.

Inevitably, one day somebody dialled it and all hell broke loose.

In the inquiry that followed, the member of staff that dialled it swore blind that he didn't know that was the panic number. He said his pager had gone off and displayed the number 888, so he dialled it. It's possible that somebody may have paged him that by mistake or as a prank. But also, the pagers beep and show 888 for a few seconds during their power on sequence, so it could have been a faulty pager. As far as I know, they never got to the bottom of exactly what happened but after that the system was changed so that the call would go to a 24 hour hotline in the ambulance station instead where a person would take the call and activate the alarm only if necessary.