Why "dial 9 for outside line" may go away
Typically, to dial out from an office line you hit 9 first. BB's saint of author services at Federated Media, Mugs Buckley, tells me that's changing for a very interesting reason. Mugs writes:
FM used an 8 and the other office I'm in just changed their system to a 7 due to the San Mateo police department getting all upset (and I don't blame them) about how many false calls there are to their system.If you've heard similar stories, please share them in the comments!
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We had enough people do this in our office that there's now a delay when the system thinks '911' has been dialed. It says, "911. Call will be completed in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1.." and then it places the call. Our users still dial '9' for an outside line.
An old cow-orker of mine, first day in the new office - and he manages to call 911 trying to get an outside line, then has an epic fail trying to explain his predicament to the operator. Did I mention he was also a part time fightfighter/inspector?
On the upside, we discovered that the local F.D. (not his) had no idea there was an office in our part of the building, and then griped at the landlord instead of my cow-orker.
CHROMAL @1, That's an interesting fix.
Happens all the time. I've done it twice when dialing outside the US (9-0-1-1... D'oh! forgot the zero) My panic response is to hang up. Then I tell the receptionist. Apparently this happens a lot but people don't tell her what happened, so when emergency services calls the switchboard she doesn't know if it is a false alarm and the police have to come make sure it isn't a real problem.
Our university has its own operators and police dispatch. All 911 calls go through them rather than the local city operator. If you just hang up after realizing you made a mistake (and I'm told, even if you explain your mistake), the university police WILL come expecting the worst to investigate...and educate since it's most likely a false alarm. Better safe than sorry!
I frequently get calls from the military. If they forget to dial the military network prefix, they get into the civilian network and I apparently have an important number. I've gotten calls from aircraft carriers, Iraq, all over. I turn the phone off when I go to bed now.
We had this happen a lot in our office.
Our phone system runs on Asterisk, so I just made a dial plan that intercepted the 911 call. It now plays my voice saying "Stop! Stop! You have just dialed 911. Stay on the line if that is what you intended."
In our area, if you dial 911 and then hang up immediately, the police are required to investigate. They get very angry on false alarms.
We build phone systems using Asterisk on Linux. You pick up the phone and dial the number you want: the switch works out how to route it. Of course our national number plan may make this easier than yours.
this use to happen at a university building I worked at a lot - unfortunately the phone system was mis-configured in such a way that the source number always appeared to be my extension. Every few days I had to explain to some very doubtful campus cop; "I swear I haven't used the phone in days!"
I think we have to dial 9911 to get emergency here, because people kept accidentally calling. I'm not sure, and I'm not going to test it.
Anyway, if I have an emergency I'm going to run all the way to a desk phone, I'm just going to reach in my pocket and hold down the '9' key.
That's another pet peeve of mine. I can turn on the keyguard, put the phone in my pocket, then lean on the keyboard, and the only button that works? The nine. I'm constantly calling 911 on this stupid phone. They never call back though.
Not entirely related, but it is somewhat, at least:
Back when I was living in the dorms at my alma mater, my phone line happened to have the extension number 7705.
I'm not entirely sure whether this was precisely what happened, but it seems the most likely explanation: Someone else living in the dorms appeared to have had their modem hooked up and set to dial an ISP at 770-5xx-xxxx if no connection was found. (Ten-digit dialing is used in Atlanta, so this would be the norm.)
The university's residence-hall network went down every once in a while.
You can see where this is going, I'm sure...
Ours has the same setup as Chromal now.
We had so many calls that the local police force threatened to stop responding to calls from our location.
My company switched to dial 8 for outside about 5 years ago 'cause someone kept calling 911 when they tried to reach the UK office.
Gah I used to work for an office where you actually had to dial 9 then 1 to get out. If you held 1 done for half a second too long you dialed the emergency number.
It happened every other call.
The last few places I've worked just have an outgoing call button on the phones.
This was happening a bunch in my office. we are constantly calling overseas, so if someone isn't careful when dialing out 9 011 you'll end up dialling 911. we had a few fines from the SFPD because of this.
I don't think this is particularly new, but perhaps it's finally spreading? When I lived in the college dorms in 2001, we had to dial 5 to get out, with the same explanation.
I had no idea this was happening, much less so common!
I like how people freak out and hang up rather than telling the operator they mis-dialed. In whitey world, they'll send a few squad cars just to make sure everything's OK. In the ghetto, uhm, they just ignore the hang up calls. You think I'm kidding.
Happened at a school where I worked, but I haven't made the mistake yet.
I did share the number of a Chicago Fishery for a couple years-two am calls for a pound of shrimp, and so forth.
sure this happens once in a while, it's called a misdial & talking to the 911 center for a second to explain would be better than hanging up, because the cops will respond to an abandoned call. every time. maybe like gangbusters.
on phone systems, the initial digit that gives you the 2nd dialtone of an outbound line is easily changed.
for telco centrex lines, like used in local govt, i think the 9 is assigned & if you ask the phone company to please change that, well...you just called a massive bureaucracy & asked them to do something seemingly simple, lotsa luck with that, keep the cell fully charged.
anyways, the responders to the call should use common sense & be relieved everything's okay. as for phone systems, if the cops come to the place where that call was misdialed from, that's good, too, as sometimes the physical address given on the 911 call might have to be loaded by the tech's that installed the system & in sophisticated systems that's frequently overlooked & either bad address info is displayed or it's misrouted & in a real emergency precious time is lost.
sorry for the long post, be safe citizens
I did that once by accident. It was a phone call that began with 9-1-212 -- the 2 just didn't quite depress. Whoops.
The one that got our office in trouble, though, was the person who'd typed in a fax number wrong and kept redialing it over and over when it failed....
At my old high school, one of my fellow band-mates always managed to do this whenever he needed to call his folks for a ride. He'd completely forget about the whole dial 9 thing. The number he was trying to call was 991-1XXX. Of course, the kid was a drummer, so that may explain things... It was quite hilarious to see all of the police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances in our town roll out to the high school. You could see the disappointment in their eyes when they discovered that it was only a false alarm. We lived in an affluent and nearly crime-less suburb of Chicago, so the emergency workers had nothing better to do than rescue kittens and bust potheads. These fake-outs were probably the highlight of their day.
@13: "someone kept calling 911 when they tried to reach the UK office."
How the hell did that happen? The country code for the UK's 44 so even if they kept forgetting the zeroes you'd have to be extremely clumsy to keep dialling 911...
I once did this accidently from home. I was calling somebody at work, and was just thinking about work. Dialed the '9' without thinking 'cause I was calling an 'outside' line, then dialed the 1st 2 digits of their extension....oooops!
About a year ago a camp I worked at changed it over to 8, because not only did the staff have to dial out, but so did the hundreds of 8-18 year olds making calls home, so yeah, unintended 911 calls were a regular occurrence around there (and usually, the kids freaked out and hung up the phone when they did that).
It doesn't help that the code for international calls is 011 or the code for North America is 01. A lot of zeroes get dropped in international numbers. Our phones use "8" for outside lines.
Kinda relieved to know I'm not the only one who's ever done that. I was dialing international and dropped the '0' but at least I stayed on and told the operator it was a mistake.
We've had that happen in our office once in a while. Luckily, not too often.
Just as bad, if not worse, here in the Kansas City Metro we have 10 digit local dialing for numbers across the Missouri/Kansas state line, and the area code on the Kansas side is 913. They've had a lot of problems when someone's finger stutters on that second digit.
Yeah, we switched from 9 to 8 here for the same reasons. It happens when people call long distance. it's not the 9 itself but the 1 people dial to get to another area code. If you're tired and have heavy fingers sometimes you hit the 1 twice.
We've had the cops come twice. Once when the pbx burped and another time when somebody had heavy fingers.
Definitely happens. When we got a UK client Boulder Police were coming by a couple times a week before we switched to 8.
Yeah, it happened to me. I dialed 9 first, but I got a error of some sort ("no such number" I believe) I tried again and got it the second time. Then a police officer showed up. I don't think my finger slipped, so I'm unsure how I called the police even.
My office changed it to 8 for that exact reason.
However they reported that the accidental calls didn't stop, not right away, anyway.
I guess the worst than can happen from an accidental 811 dialing is you'll find out whether there's a gas main under your office.
Very soon after starting my first job at a university bookstore, I made the same mistake. Struck me immediately as a dumb way to make a system, but I didn't know at the time dialing 9 was an industry standard. Now strikes me as very dumb.
--Shelby Davis
This was an issue for folks in Arizona; one of the Scottsdale prefixes was 991-xxxx, so 1/10 of those numbers started with "9911". People who didn't dial 9 before making an outside call (9-991-1xxx) would therefore call 911....
@10:
I've dialed 9-1-1 from my cell phone too. I was at a party in high school (obviously drinking underage) and had literally cracked my first beer and was about to take a sip when my phone rang. It was the MA State police. For fleeting seconds I had the horrible feeling they they were somehow watching me until the cop on the other end asked me why I had called and yelled at me to turn on my keypad lock.
I've heard a hotel receptionist complain because the instructions on the phones read "dial 9 then 1 then the number, including area code", and a lot of people dial 9-1-(1 xxx-xxx-xxxx), not realizing the 1 in the instructions is the same as the one in their number.
@#23:
In the US you have to dial "011" to initiate an international call. So the UK would be "011 44" and *then* the destination number. Mistakenly dialing "911" instead of "9011" is not so far fetched.
I just had a conference call with Amsterdam today and I jokingly told a colleague, "I'm always nervous I'm going to hit '911' by mistake."
In Australia, our emergency number is 000 and most office telephone systems use 0 as the external access number.
0055 used to be used for premium rate phone services (most notably sex lines) and people after such services would often add the extra 0 prefix and reach emergency. This has since been changed (to 1900 numbers) since the introduction of longer phone numbers throughout australia.
what is YOUR jurisdiction's law on admitting or denying police entry after a hang-up 911 call?
We use 8 to dial out, but to reach Helpdesk, you dial 9111.
To reach 911, you'd dial 8911. I'm not sure I'm understanding why this is an issue. Our phone system doesn't send the 911 out without an 8.
Here in my office in Australia, it's 0 for an outside line and 9 for the receptionist. So it's backward from what I'm used to (I'm an American), which has caused me to dial our receptionist erroneously many, many times.
Once when I was in police custody I was able to call out by dialing 9. I even received a call!
My partner needed to call my cell while she was visiting my parent's house where her cell doesn't get reception.
So she used the house landline.
The only other place where she hand dials my number is from her office which requires a "9"
and she had to dial "1" to call long distance . The house phone is old and the buttons "stutter".
Thus I received the following call.
ME:hello,
HER: Hi, Oh argh... there's another call...
(click of call waiting)
pause of 30 seconds
HER:hello? Oh no!! again! Dammit dammit dammit!(click of call waiting, again)
pause of 30 seconds
HER:Hello
ME:hello. Um... what IS happening?
HER: Its the police! they won't stop calling me!
ME: What???
HER:I called them and now they won't believe me that nothing's wrong.
ME: Why did you call the police? is something wrong?
HER: NO!! NOTHING IS WRONG!!! ARGGH!!! THEY WON'T STOP CALLING ME!!! OH SHIT!! THE POLICE ARE HERE AT THE HOUSE NOW!!! I NEED TO GO!
(CLICK)
The police station is less than a block from the house and they showed up at the door with lights flashing. She had to explain the utter lack of predicament to them and my parents.
She was too mortified to talk for the rest of the day.
A side story. At college, the phone system had a dialout number.
People who didn't make a lot of outside calls would forget this sometimes, and end up accidentally reaching an on-campus extension instead of the off-campus number because they forgot the dialout number. One of the more popular numbers was MovieFone, at 333-FILM (333-3456).
The campus security hotline number was 3333.
NC State University is switching to 7 on Nov. 1
Our office uses 9 to dial out also, and I did accidentally dial 911 when I meant to dial a long distance number. Oops. Thankfully I kept my head and was able to explain to the dispatch operator that I had been dialing out from an office. She asked me if everything was okay, and if there was someone there that was making me say that. I was a bit creeped out by that question, but I can understand why they asked it. Finally she ascertained that there was no emergency, I apologized again for mis-dialing, and we rang off. I'd love it if my office switched to another number to call outside lines, or just gave us a button on our phones that would do it.
In 1998 I inadvertantly called 911 in Santa Clara - twice in a row - while trying to configure Windows 98 dial-up because of dial 9 for outside line and US country code setting 1 + also putting 1 in front of the actual number.
I had to change my company's phone system to use 8 last year. A new employee at that time managed to dial 911 three times by their second week with the company.
My company, a 9-1-1 systems provider, actually had to change our dial out number from 9 for this very reason. It is not the best for customer relations when you cause your customers to receive false calls.
Yep the old Centrex PBX convention. Our company required "dial 9" for everything except two of the modem lines. That got changed on an upgrade to the phone system to include the fax lines. Since we do a little overseas business we started having problems with country code 11 and our local emergency call center. One of our office help got banned from faxing anything at all. She could never remember to not dial 9. That cut it down to an occasional once every two month occurence when a salesperson would forget and try to fax 911.
Damn, I am embarrassed to admit that I have done this not once, not twice, but three times.
I am such a N00b when it comes to using my fingers...
The phones at my office had a bug that would make them double-dial numbers occasionally. So, if you were dialing long distance, you would dial 9 for an outside line, then 1, and voila... 9-911
We could avoid this confusion if everyone would just remember the number for the new emergency services... "nicer ambulances, faster response time and better looking drivers."
0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3.
Moss: "Well that's easy to remember."
This happened a lot at my old workplace. Every so often an interoffice email memo would go around from office management demanding that people pay better attention when dialing. Unfortunately, blaming folks for making human errors always trumped putting efforts into making the system more user-friendly at that company, which went bankrupt and collapsed a year ago during the first wave of mortgage company meltdowns.
Another big problem that we had was that our loan officer/account rep doofs would fax stuff out from the manual fax machines, but leave off the 1 for long distance calls. This is understandable, since while the system phones required a 9 and then a 1 for long distance calls, the faxes were all off-system and needed no 9 but did need a 1, and the company Blackberries needed neither... how did this mess happen in the first place? Why couldn't the Sysco phones just have an "outside line" button instead of these dumb codes? Anyhow, basically if you skipped the 1 and dialed, say, to reach the fax of some mortgage broker in Colorado, you'd really be dialing some local dude's home number: , and he'd be pissed as hell to get the three fax attempt calls and would then threaten the company with do-not-call mayhem.
Whew. I could go on & on here. The trials of sending a fax or call to a number that's since been forwarded to another number that is on the do-not-call list: this is untrackable by either the phone company or the call generator, but annoying as hell to the recipient. Imagine: you sign up to get daily auto-calls & giant, ink-wasting, endlessly spooling faxes from 10 different hated marketing companies (sent to the junk phone number that you get as part of a package deal from your cable company but never use), then forward all your calls to your worst enemy. The perfect crime! A nightmare for everyone but you! Your victim calls and complains to the originating companies but hey, his number's not in any of their databases so tough luck for him. And the real destination number- yours- isn't on any of the faxes or mentioned in the calls, so there's no way for anyone to figure out which of the thousands of numbers in their database is the tricky one. Headaches all around.
Here in Australia, 1 or 0 are often used to dial out. our emergency number is 000 and to dial internationally, we dial 0011.
All of these facts came into stark relief several years ago when I had a non voice modem that i was using at work.
It was set to dial out, then dial an American fax number.
Once i brought the computer home, instead of answering, the number had some sort of not connected message that was unrecognisable through the modem speaker.
On the third try, I picked up a phone to hear exactly what the problem was, only to discover there was person on the other end, not an automated message, and that person was an emergency services operator.
It turns out, if you dial 0 0011 ---- ----, no matter what the later numbers are, the first 3 0s connect you to emergency services....
I expect this is so you can call for help, even if there is someone in your house and look like you are dialing a normal number.
I quickly removed the first 0 after that...
I used to do support for Procomm Plus (modem software for all you young-uns)... inside the software you could define the outside line number. Occasionally someone would put in 9 and 1 because they knew they were dialing long distance... they'd then enter the phone number including the 1 so that it ultimately dialed 911 through their modem.
Separately, I was teaching my daughter once about 911 and was using a cell phone to do so... did you know you don't have to hit send when you dial 911 on many cell phones? I do now...
LarryD
Years back the technical support department I was working for installed a new phone system. Incoming calls would go to a customer service rep, who'd triage and then transfer them to the appropriate call queue.
The procedure for transferring a call involved dialing a 9. The queue for support engineers was "114". If the CS rep hit 9 twice by mistake, the customer--who was probably calling from a different time zone about trouble installing a hard disk or something--would suddenly hear "911 dispatch, what's your emergency?"
We renumbered the engineer queue pretty quick, as I recall.
I work, to my shame, as an "outbound sales representative," and we accidentally dial 911 ALL the time.
Happened to me in a Canadian hotel. Worst thing is that I didn't realise and started ordering pizza. When I had reached the olives the operator interrupted me and explained what I was doing.
112 is the European emergency number. I only recently realised that this will override the keypad lock on European mobile phones, so it can still be dialled by accident if the lock is on.
If you're a phone system admin and happen to be reading this, there's an easy fix. There's no need to go to the extent of changing the outside access digit. (Sorry to bore the rest of you.)
Simply build a 911X route pattern as well as a 911 route pattern. Direct the 911X pattern to a blocked route (reorder tone, disconnect, etc.) and set your inter-digit timeout to 5-7 seconds. Now when someone dials 911, because of the two possible matches, the system will wait 5 seconds before routing the call. If it's a mis-dial and they continue to enter more digits after the second 1, they'll immediately get reorder tone. If it's a true 911 call, after 5 seconds the call will be routed to the PSAP. Works like a charm, and has eliminated 100% of our false dials.
I work at a police dispatch room and we are guaranteed to get several 911 calls per day where they report it was accidental as they have to dial 9 to get out.
At my office, they sent around a memo telling us to stay on the line if we accidentally dial 911, so we can inform the operator that it was a mis-dial.
Apparently, they send the cops over to investigate any non-responsive dial.
I've seen worse. A total moron was trying to install some ISP disk on a work PC. There actually was an old modem in the machine. He plugged it into a dedicated fax line so it didn't need the 9 to dial out. He manually entered the number he was trying to connect to--a long distance call.
I had to straighten out the mess, I stripped off all the garbage that had been installed as there was utterly no reason for it--the machine already had internet access and the number he was trying to connect to wasn't even a modem, anyway. I explained about the wrong numbers and that what he was attempting to accomplish was utterly impossible anyway.
He did it again.
At that point I removed the modem.
(Oh, the joys of a boss whose mind was fried.)
I've done what some others have commented... Modern systems like Asterisk can be easily set up to figure out the appropriate routing for any number dialed. So- no dialing "9" or any other special numbers in my office. You dial an internal extension- it goes there, a branch extension- it goes there, local and/or long-distance- it goes there. It also handles secondary long-distance dialing codes automatically, and can route calls via POTS or Internet as needed.
I haven't put in any of the "911" systems suggested (time delays, count-downs, alerts), but these are really good ideas. Ours just dials "911" if someone dials it, and we've only had that happen a couple of times by new employees who are still "programmed" with the whole dial-9 thing.
We had some automated software that used a modem to connect to an office in the (local) 913 area code. For some reason, an upgrade caused it to start double-dialing each digit - 9,911... After the fourth call the call center was quite adamant that we take the system off-line until we figured it out.
When I was in grad school (molecular biology), we were cautioned about this in orientation. We were also told NOT to call 911 if there was a chemical, biological, or other lab emergency. Calling 911 routed the call to outside operators, who sent the local police-fire-etc., who were much less experienced with the types of materials found in molecular biology & chemistry labs. They typically overreacted and the building would end up shut down for hours, if not days.
Don't change 9. People have been dialing 9 to get an outside line for years and this was not such a problem 5 years ago. What changed? The People! Set up your PBX to alert your operator when a 911 call has been placed but do not interrupt the call. Your operator can then call the extension that made it and ask if it was a true emergency or not, if the person does not answer then assume the worst and get someone to check the station that made the call. Number your stations intelligently so that it is easy to locate the caller. Make it part of your training that if you accidentally call 911 to please stay on the line and tell them it was a mistake and let them know the importance of adherence to this rule by telling them that if they do not follow it there will be consequences. If you place anything in front of a 911 call you are just asking for a lawsuit. 911 must work with no delays because when you’re actually calling it for real any time wasted can be life threatening. I get a lot of excuses about heavy fingers and hard numbers to dial because of repeating nines and ones… Please, give me a break and stop coddling these people, the problem is not dialing the 9 before the call it’s the people that aren’t paying attention to what they are dialing. You have someone that does it twice and they are not an executive then write them up. If they are executives mock them quietly in the back room. Please do not change a standard that has been around since the first PBX’s because people have become so brain dead that they can’t dial 9 1919-XXX-XXXX without dialing 911 and then hanging up like they just heard the devil on the other side of the call.
In chicago, you get billed for bad 911 calls. Our company switched after a few misdialled international calls (9-11-number instead of 9-011-number)
I can't really call it brain-deadness. The only scenario where you should get emergency service if you're on a dial 9 line is if you dial 9911. For example, if you're dialing 9-011 for international and you fat-finger the 0 as a 9, or if you forget to dial the 9 for an outside line when you're calling 991-1xxx. You could also run into problems if you twitch and double-punch a number, or if the buttons on your cheap phone are wonky and either respond too well or not well enough when they are pressed (causing one to use excessive force...).
Using 8 for an outside line isn't a cure-all. While it would prevent most double-pumping and international LD mistakes, you could still get the scenario where someone forgets to dial 8 for outside when they're calling 891-1xxx.
My employer has been using 8 for several years.
I wonder if the apparently increasing incidence of these problems is due to people getting used to LCD number displays and clear buttons. I know I used to be much more careful when I would dial phones in the olden days before LCDs and clear buttons.
I must be missing something.
The 9 is normally not sent out, it would just get you to the 2nd dial tone, not?
Or do you have telephone numbers that start with 9911, and you forget to dial the extra 9 for outside line?
...
I work in a high school, and we have special phones in our offices for students to dial out if they need to call home for whatever reason.
We also have a newer PBX (Nortel Meridian) with a dial prefix of 9. The way our system and phone lines are setup, you need to dial all calls as though they were long-distance. This means 9+1+XXX-XXXX. The system is also programmed, for safety reasons, to select a trunk automatically if you just dial "911," so they will both go through.
Now, what usually happens is students dial 911 trying to dial out, hear the emergency services operator, and hang up quickly. Happens two or three times a week.