Do you carry your phone all the time?

This morning I received an email from my pest control company that said “oops, there seems to be something wrong with your account. Please contact us at this number.”

It all looked legitimate so I checked my checking account, there was plenty of money in there, and no information had been changed.

So I called the pest control company but NOT from the number listed in the email.

She said my account is just fine, but something was wrong on their end and they would have their IT folks look into it.

So the message here is never call the number listed on an email, even if it does show as the same number you have in your phone or is listed on their website.
 
Nicole Oakes said:
No, I am quite stupid when it comes to the phone! I am just from the wrong generation I guess. We did fine without it and am too old to learn,
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I had an Android for decades. Then my phone got battery issues (the battery was swelling and distorted the case), and Apple was running a deal where they would give you credit for your old Android. I got more money for the phone than I paid for it (although iPhones are overpriced.)

I never really learned many features on the Android because I mostly used it to make phone calls. I rarely text (since I have a darned telephone in my hand) and I don't surf the web on such a tiny screen if I can help it. When I was switching to the Apple phone, I was so concerned that I would not even know how to answer a call on the different platform that I watched videos and read articles on it. The result was that I knew more about the iPhone on Day One than I ever knew about the Androids I had owned for decades.

I still think back to the days where we got by with landlines and answering machines (remember walking into the house and looking to see if the light was blinking?), and before that there were no answering machines so we either connected or we didn't, and before that Party Lines.

So I'm on your side. As I stated earlier, the main reason I got a cell phone in the first place was that all the pay phones disappeared, so if I got stuck on the road somewhere, I would have no way to call for help.

ps: Welcome to the forum!!
 
John Brunner said:
I still think back to the days where we got by with landlines and answering machines (remember walking into the house and looking to see if the light was blinking?), and before that there were no answering machines so we either connected or we didn't, and before that Party Lines.
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I can remember when our "number" was short-short-long. Whenever anyone on the party line received a call, it would ring at everyone's house, so you had to listen for your "number." Two short rings followed by a long one, and it was for us, and anyone on the party line could listen in. As a teenager, I had to be careful about what was said because at least one of my aunts would probably be listening in. My mom would know everyone else's "number," and we were related to pretty much everyone on the party line, so if it was for one of her sisters, she'd quietly pick up the phone to see if the caller was someone she knew, and, if so, she might join in, and there might be a half dozen people involved in the phone call. If it was someone she didn't know or didn't care to talk to, she'd quietly set the phone back in the cradle. It was a crank phone, so if you wanted to make a call, you'd pick up the receiver, crank the phone, and the operator (Sarah), who worked from home, would connect you.
 
Ken Anderson said:
I can remember when our "number" was short-short-long. Whenever anyone on the party line received a call, it would ring at everyone's house, so you had to listen for your "number." Two short rings followed by a long one, and it was for us, and anyone on the party line could listen in. As a teenager, I had to be careful about what was said because at least one of my aunts would probably be listening in. My mom would know everyone else's "number," and we were related to pretty much everyone on the party line, so if it was for one of her sisters, she'd quietly pick up the phone to see if the caller was someone she knew, and, if so, she might join in, and there might be a half dozen people involved in the phone call. If it was someone she didn't know or didn't care to talk to, she'd quietly set the phone back in the cradle. It was a crank phone, so if you wanted to make a call, you'd pick up the receiver, crank the phone, and the operator (Sarah), who worked from home, would connect you.
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We move to Virginia in the early 60s and shared a line with the elderly couple next door. (I don't recall whether or not we had a Party Line in Indiana.) He was a nice old man and she was cranky and nosy. I had 5 siblings. You would often see her curtains pulled aside as she was trying to see what we were all up to...so we would dramatically fling ours open to make her shut hers. We were not offended...it was harmless enough. When we answered our ring, we learned to say something mean about her to make her hang up...then we had our privacy.

It's kinda sad that these little bits of connection are gone.
 
When I was a small child, we had "modern" phones since we lived in suburban NYC. We had 13 VHF channels on the TV and a private phone line with a 7 digit number. When we moved to PA after my father died to save money, we had a party line with a 3 minute limit to a call. We didn't have to go through an operator but I think we were down to a 5-digit number. Private lines became available a few years after our move, so we signed up for one. I was always sad that after the move we only got 3 channels on the TV because it was a private cable with an antenna on the mountain top and wires coming down from there.
 
No party lines but all equipment was owned by the postal service and was on monthly rental including extension wires. Charges were on minute usage. Father put a big egg timer next to the phone in the entry. Bitter cold in winter and no way to get past the actual entry door.
 
Since we're telling general phone stories...

My mother was a WW2 bride. Back in the day, international (and all long distance) calls were extremely expensive, so calling her relatives back home was a rare, short, timed treat. I guess many of us remember phone calls to relatives and the phone would get passed around: "Say Hi to grandma," and then the thing would get yanked out of your hand and passed on to the next person.

When we moved to Virginia she made friends with a couple of other Brits (there was/is an organization named The Transatlantic Brides and Parents Association, consisting of Brits who relocated to North America during and after the war.) The husband (Bill) was a ham radio operator. My mother could go to Bill's home, and he would contact a fellow Ham in England, who would connect his radio to a land line and dial up her relatives. She could (and did) speak to them as often as she wanted for as long as she wanted, for free.
 
My grandparents had a phone and it was a party line. My parents did not have a phone, and I must have been about 10 or 11 years old when they finally got one. I remember I couldn't wait for it to ring. Exciting times!:D

I can still remember our old phone number too, but I can hardly remember my own cell phone number these days, when I am asked. :rolleyes:
 
Beth Gallagher said:
I don't remember being on a party line but we didn't get many phone calls back when I was a kid. Weird that I still remember our phone number when the exchange name was part of the number. It was YU (Yukon) 2-4213.

I remember my parents freaking out over long distance costs, though. No idle chit-chat!!
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I remember the phone number from when I was a kid. EM (Emerson) 2-7123. When I was 9 years old we moved to Virginia and the prefix for our home was DU for Dunn Loring. The exchange in Arlington VA where I had vendors I did business with as an adult was JA (Jackson) 4-xxxx. I just looked, and that system was phased out in the 60s.

Kinda sucks. Everything gets sanitized.
 
Krystal Shay said:
My grandparents had a phone and it was a party line. My parents did not have a phone, and I must have been about 10 or 11 years old when they finally got one. I remember I couldn't wait for it to ring. Exciting times!:D

I can still remember our old phone number too, but I can hardly remember my own cell phone number these days, when I am asked. :rolleyes:
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I started my Purchasing career in 1978 and still remember some of the vendor's phone numbers from back then, since I called them so many times and there was no speed dialing.

Since we've wandered this far afield...I used to read a magazine titled Hacker's Quarterly 2600. It was full of weird things that contributors had learned to spoof...commercial and retail. (It's since morphed into being a place for personal privacy advocates to gather with their tips.) The 2600 part of the title came from either the first or the most infamous known hacking (and it relates to the thread topic.)

As we've discussed, long distance phone calls used to be very expensive. Back in the 60s (when touch tone phones were introduced), some enterprising nerd discovered that if you blew the free whistle that came in a box of Cap'n Crunch Cereal into the phone's mouthpiece at just the right time, you got access to Operator Mode and--among other things--could make all the free long distance calls you wanted to.

The magazine has 2600 in its name because the Cap'n Crunch whistle blew at a frequency of 2600hz, exactly the right tone to spoof Ma Bell.
 
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John Brunner said:
I remember the phone number from when I was a kid. EM (Emerson) 2-7123. When I was 9 years old we moved to Virginia and the prefix for our home was DU for Dunn Loring. The exchange in Arlington VA where I had vendors I did business with as an adult was JA (Jackson) 4-xxxx. I just looked, and that system was phased out in the 60s.

Kinda sucks. Everything gets sanitized.
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Emerson! Our number back when was EM7- 7324. This was in southern Ohio, early 60s
 
Hoot Crawford said:
Emerson! Our number back when was EM7- 7324. This was in southern Ohio, early 60s
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That's interesting. We were northwest of Indianapolis.

I took a quick look on the internet, and the Exchange Names are often (but not always) from a list published by Ma Bell in 1955. The names are supposed to be distinct enough that there is no misunderstanding as to what they are. So you and I may have had Emerson because Emerson is one of the Ma Bell recommendations for 36x-xxxx. Exchange Names in use before 1955 were not required to change. Perhaps yours and mine were something different before then, and got updated. Or maybe we were Emerson all along.

I always assumed that Exchange Names were tied to regional names of people or places, as it seems that some pre-1955 ones were. For example, our exchange in Virginia was 385. Ma Bell suggests DUdley, DUnkirk or DUpont. Ours pre-dated 1955 and was named for a nearby neighborhood called DUnn Loring, and it was kept. At some point in the 60s population growth caused our exchange in that home to change from 385 to 938. I don't recall knowing the new Exchange Name or having the Exchange Name letters used in the phone number label that was on the phone, so apparently Exchange Names were already falling out of common usage.

Here is Ma Bell's list of recommended Exchange Names, for the curious. Exchanges begin with 22 thru 29, 32 thru 39, up to 92 thru 99. None of them have a 1 or a 0 in them. 57, 95 and 97 have no recommended name because they were reserved for radio telephone numbers (and this was in 1955.)

List
 
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