"Aquiring satellite signal, please wait..."

Story I heard from close collegue of mine that works at a major call center
in canada (tech support in satellite tv) so as the story goes... One night
03/13/2003 business as usual, but (major but) around 5:00pm est there was a
problem, when a CSR (customer service representitive) would answer the phone,
at company ...(thank you for calling Bell express Vu, my name is bob
how can I help you?) at the same time a CSR from the competitors would also
answer saying ...(thank you for calling starchoice, my name is jane how can
i help you?) at this point, the customer that dialed the 1-800 number for
his satellite provider would get two representitives, one from each company!

Also put to my attention was that every call coming thru was on the famous
'0' queue, hence, the people who don't take the fucking time to go thru the
options to get on the right path to getting help with the proper department,
they just smash zero, hear a voice and start barking at the CSR cause they
too stupid to work the hi-tech remote to buy some porn at 3:00 in the after-
noon on pay-per-view, or they got cut off after four months of not paying
their bill (damn welfare case).

Well... when I heard this, first a laughed, then I got him to do a little
research, first I asked him for a small list of all the prefixes of the
calls that were doing the strange cross lined thingy, well I was very lucky
cause he got me a list from the telephone admin that flaged every fucked
call that came in the '0' queue. Here are the prefixes affected:

area codes: 416 & 514

336, 337, 338, 339, 426, 428, 429, 457, 473, 475, 630, 693, 694
695, 697, 699, 782, 783, 903, 879, 880, 881, 882, 883, and 884.


If you notice anything, those are all telus cell prefixes in Ontario and
Quebec... so I laughed a little more. Now it's not that I didn't believe
him but I wanted to confirm all this, so I took the liberty to verify myself
and I called Starchoice. I said I was Paul Jones with Johnson Security, and I
was hired by Telus Mobility to investigate the problem on 03/13/2003. First I
got a CSR answer thank you for blah, blah blah... asked to be transferred to a
director, cause it was saturday, no one was in but a lowly supervisor, ask if
he could confirm the problem, first it was no, then I said; "I'll just put
you on hold to call telus and verify..." and I had a coffee and smoke, I came
back and he mystically had an answer. He confirmed that yes they had the same
problem, but did not want to confirm the prefixes over the phone. He wanted
contact info at this point to call me back, (fuck that!) so I said that because
I'm on contract with Telus, they would have to talk to them directly, then they
would send me a memo... ha! Well then a said thanks and quickly ended the call.

So TO END the story, they haven't had the problem since. I wish I had some
kind of tech follow-up to add on why this happened, but sorry to say, I don't.

It's probably some error at the switch (cell CO), and since all the calls were
coming in through the '0' queue, it was probably easy to set up as both companies
have that same queuing system (I checked). If anybody wants to add to this story
like a valid explanation, all the power to you...

Hope you enjoyed it!

Kybo_Ren

03/15/03