John Rumm wrote:
Tony Williams wrote:

I wonder what would have happened if one were to dial the codes
back and forth or in a circle back to the starting exchange.


When I worked at Ferranti in Bracknell, (before
STD), one of the lunchtime competitions was to
do exactly that. You needed two phones near to
each other, both with direct dial out. Then tap
from local exchange to local exchange and finally
back to the nearby phone. The winner of course
was the one who went through the highest number
of exchanges.


When I was at my first job with GEC Sensors, there was one engineering
department that got the hump when one of the bean counters put a call
bar on the phone number for the local squash courts, when he noticed it
turn up regularly on the phone logs. So the engineers worked out a way
you could use the GEC internal phone network (which as far as phone
networks go, is vast), to dial through from one bit of the empire to
another to see if they could get an outside line from there. Eventually
they found a route but it had to go through several different companies
to get there.

A month or so later the bean counter paid the boss of the department a
visit, since he had eventually spotted these 30 odd digit numbers and
work out what they did. He told him all about what was going on, and
then asked what he was going to do about it. The boss (a good humoured
Welshman) said he was going to go and congratulate the engineers
concerned on the grounds that they were showing exactly the type of
inventive thinking that the company needed, and an extra local phone
call was a small price to pay out of a project budget of millions!

Sounds very similar to where I worked at, a few years ago (more than
about 15.)

On site were various places to make an outside call from a pay call box.
But, it turned out, that it was costing the company far more than
letting them use the phone on their desk to make a call. Result was
every one used their local desk phone.

15 or 20 years ago, my overheads to employ me were about £1-00 a minute,
so you can see how cost effective it could be.

Dave