2600 Robbed of Touch-Tones
All right, it isn't all that much of a story. But it is worthy of note that for nearly ten years, we've enjoyed the use of our Touch-Tone phones here at the 2600 offices. But several months after our central office was cut over from a crossbar to a #5 ESS digital switch, we found that all of our Touch-Tone phones no longer cut the dial tone.
You see, we have steadfastly refused to pay a surcharge New York Telephone levies on anyone who uses a Touch-Tone phone. The charge is small (under $2 a month) but it's the principle. It's a fact that there is no special equipment needed to process Touch-Tones. Quite the contrary, it takes special equipment to ignore Touch-Tones! It's nothing short of blackmail.
Our phones still generate tones that are perfectly usable - only not for dialing. Fortunately, it wasn't hard at all to switch everything - phones, computers, fax machine - to pulse dial. It takes longer to dial and the more 9's and 0's we generate, the more we tie up New York Telephone's equipment. Their loss, not ours.
To give you an idea of the absurdity of the situation, this is what New York Telephone has to enter into their computer to stop ignoring our Touch-Tones:
They want to charge us $16 to type that.