So Many Random Phone Numbers

Today in Tedium: NYNEX hasn’t been a going concern since Smash Mouth was first telling us to walk on the sun. (You might know it under its current post-merger name, Verizon.) But that didn’t stop me last night from dialing up a message on my Google Hangouts window with an automated request from a NYNEX operator that I deposit five cents or my phone call will be terminated. (Couldn’t do it. I didn’t have a coin slot in my laptop, though I’m sure a nickel might fit in my SD port.) This was an unusual circumstance of me dialing up a specific number with an odd area code and testing my luck. These sort of weird phone “test numbers” are all over the place. You just have to know where to look. Today’s Tedium explains the phenomenon, as well as the current status of 1-800-COLLECT. Hope you have some extra minutes sitting around! — Ernie @ Tedium

Editor’s note: We have a follow-up on this post, with more weird numbers! Check it out over this way.

The strange phone number with the best pronunciation you can find

“Fishing in a mountain stream is my idea of a good time.“

“Serve the hot rum to the tired heroes.“

If you dial (858) 651-5050, you’ll hear what sounds like the most unusual poem ever produced. It’s a series of phrases, recited by both male and female speakers, that sound a little too … well, perfect. It’s as if the words were chosen from random novels, less for how much they make sense and more about how well each individual sentence flows together.

And you’d be right. Because these sentences were basically decided upon to highlight the nuances of speech. These phrases—there are dozens of them—were chosen because they were phonetically balanced, and therefore should be recognizable and understandable in many audio conditions.

The sentences, colloquially called the “Harvard Sentences” and first introduced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1969 as the “IEEE Recommended Practice for Speech Quality Measurements,” have roots in World War II, when Harvard scientists at the school’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory helped to test different kinds of noises for wartime military communications.

These phrases, which can be viewed here, have been updated periodically over the years to reflect modern sensibilities. They generally follow a specific pattern—largely single syllables, with one or two multi-syllable words.

Sarah Zhang, who wrote an excellent piece on the phenomenon for Gizmodo last year, notes that Harvard researchers focused on the audio testing capabilities of the sentences specifically designed sentences that could be misheard in poor audio conditions.

The sentences are deliberately simple and short—monosyllabic words punctuated by exactly one two syllable word sentence. Some garbled version of the sentences would be played on tape, and volunteers attempted to make sense of what they heard. The idea was to test how much a person could mishear before they lost the meaning of a sentence.

So why is there this number just hanging out there, with some random Harvard Sentences being spouted off at all times of day? Well, it’s an easy way to test your mobile phone quality—the “can you hear me now” guys at Verizon and other companies rely on these things to ensure the signal quality is strong.

This number is just one of many test numbers that you’ll find hanging around, and they tend to exist to help phone companies make your service better.

I discovered this number through a testing tool provided by T-Mobile, and it’s pretty much the most poetic, automated thing I’ve ever heard.

So, if you’re feeling ambitious and want to hear some weirdly soothing sentences on your phone, give it a call at (858) 651-5050. As the Harvard Sentences would put it, “Open your book to the first page.”

1-800-COLLECT, 1-800-CALL-ATT, 10-10-220, and the mass-marketed super-numbers

These days, you can’t watch an episode of anything without stumbling into an ad for a fantasy sports service like FanDuel or DraftKings.

But if you remember the ’90s and early 2000s, you might have felt a wave of deja vu the first time you saw those ads. Not because fantasy sports were so awesome in the ’90s, but because we had been through this whole mass-saturation thing before regarding a relatively narrow product with a very wide audience.

The phone numbers 10-10-220, 1-800-COLLECT, and 1-800-CALL-ATT were inescapable as advertising icons during the ’90s and early 2000s. These services, designed to help save money on various aspects of landline phone calls (10-10-220 was a workaround for high-cost long-distance calling; the other two, services for cheaper collect calls), utilized major stars for their numerous ads.

Mr. T was a notable shill for the WorldCom-owned 1-800-COLLECT, once starring in an ad with a before-he-was-famous Aaron Paul.

AT&T’s 1-800-CALL-ATT, meanwhile, turned David Arquette into the most famous person doing television ads for a couple of years.

And 10-10-220? That service, owned by WorldCom subsidiary Telecom USA, brought us the sight of Alf having a conversation with Terry Bradshaw.

All of these services started getting aggressively promoted basically because they were services that made these companies a ton of freaking money, and were specifically useful during the decade-long period between the decline of long-distance calling and the rise of smartphones. In fact, when the Wall Street Journal wrote about the phenomenon in 2001, 36 percent of teenagers already had a mobile device of some kind, meaning that the services were already facing an existential threat.

Another problem with the numbers is that people occasionally have fat fingers and dial the wrong number, putting in 1-800-CLLL-ATT or 1-800-COLLCCT. As is common nowadays with some URLs, scam artists saw an opportunity to make money off of your bad luck. The problem was serious enough that the FCC had to offer a warning to consumers about the risks of collect-call misdials.

You get connected to the party you wished to call, but the phone company that connects you is not the one you thought you were using. Instead, it is a company that secured 800 numbers similar to well-known ones, likely hoping that you might accidentally misdial your intended number. If this happens, you are probably unaware you are using a different phone carrier than the one you intended to use because you don’t know you misdialed. Often, the company won’t identify itself to you or the person receiving the collect call before connecting the call.

These days, though, the real risks come from using the services you once saw on TV.

That’s right. 1-800-COLLECT, 1-800-CALL-ATT, and 10-10-220 are still around, and they’ve not gotten less expensive with time.

As a result, your collect-call subjects could find themselves paying $1.49 per minute with a $13.50 service charge if you use 1-800-CALL-ATT. That’s bad, but not as bad as 1-800-COLLECT, which charges a $10.63 connection fee, along with a $3.99-per-minute charge for an in-state payphone call from Virginia.

The company’s website still promotes its long history of ads with The Simpsons, Ed O’Neill, Arsenio Hall, and Phil Hartman, but it buries the prices in a confusing menu that’s hard to figure out, a click-heavy mess that’s almost designed to encourage people to give up.

It’s pretty understandable, considering the service preys on people who don’t know the rates, like this Ars Technica reader who found a $42.55 charge waiting for him after he called his California home from Las Vegas.

The lesson here: If you’re stuck without a device and you need to call someone, get a burner phone. It’s probably cheaper, and the odds of finding a payphone in 2016 are pretty low, anyway.