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From: goldstein@delni.enet.dec.com
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Bay of Eagle Fiasco (really: 12345678)
Message-ID: 
Date: 10 Aug 89 13:44:30 GMT
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X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 288, message 10 of 11

Somebody wrote,
>>Once upon a time, my brother (who was about ten years old at the time) picked
>>up the phone and dialed:
>
>>1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0

This was covered in Art Brothers' column "The Party Line" in Telephone
Engineer and Management a couple years back.  Now Art owns Beehive Tel
in Grouse Creek, Utah, which serves zillions of acres of barren desert,
with a thousand or so subscribers spread across six exchanges.
Seriously remote territory west of the salt flats and along the NV
border.  And Mountain Bell hates him.  (Art's a professional iconoclast
who may have gone into the phone business for the sake of being able to
argue with Ma Bell.  He's the first and often last thing I read in
TE&M.)

So when he opened a new exchange near some mining camp or other such
outpost (using Harris D-1200 PBXs as COs, btw), Ma gave him the prefix
"234".  Gee, that's a nice one, though Art.  Until he noticed thousands
of incompleted pegs to a vacant number.  Yep, 234-5678.

In Utah, as in many other areas, 1+ is used for all toll, including
intra-area code.  So 12345678 is a valid dialing arrangement.  The 90
doesn't do anything.
     fred