[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
(COOLLIST) Fun with Exchanges
An interesting story about how some things got to be as they are
in Chicago:
"'Twas a funny thing how our 312-744 exchange came to be also. City
Hall and all the various police stations all over the city moved onto
312-744 as a centrex in the late 1960's. (Since then they have expanded
to include 745 and 747, but that is not the point of this story.) The
old RAndolph-6-8000 was abandoned, and I am not sure if it ever has
been re-assigned or not, but anyway, recall please that the 1960's in
America were a perfectly dreadful time with respect to civil
disobedience and general discontent with the government. Riots
everywhere including two here in 1968 alone. The police were known as
'pigs', and someone who worked for Illinois Bell at the time City Hall
was changed over to the new centrex had the duty of assigning an
available prefix (and there were plenty of them in those days) to the
new centrex account. After some thought and careful consideration of
the letters on the telephone dial, a central office technician given
the duty of setting it up said -- with a perfectly straight face mind
you -- that the new prefix they would open for the City Hall and Police
centrex would be 744. No one questioned it; no one apparently thought
twice about it. Once it was turned on and too late to do anything about
it, word quickly went around that to reach the Chicago Police or the
local politicians with the new phone system, one simply dialed PIG
followed by the pig's four digit extension number. PIG-4000 got you the
City Hall switchboard, while PIG-5000 got you the Mayor's Office."
-- quoted from Pat Townsend in the Telecom Digest
--
Ben Combee, CAD Software Engineer, UNIX guru, self-inflicting poet
Motorola Paging Products Group, Strategic Semiconductor Operation--Austin
combee@ptsg-austin.sps.mot.com +1 512 891 7141 Pager #897141 - Austin