Disappearing post



  • So I was reading the Sidebar's RSS feed when I stumbled upon this post, entitled "Matchmaking cellphone network", by a new user named Phillipus.

    @Phillipus said:

    A very strange thing happened to me a few days ago. I was busy doing some work, minding my own business when my cellphone rang. I answered and waited for the caller to respond. Nothing, just a stunned silence. After a few 'hello's' from my side, he finally spoke up: "Who's this?"

    I told him my name and asked him who he was. He answered in a confused tone: "Well, you phoned me! Who're you looking for?"

    After 30 seconds of back - and - forth 'No, you phoned me!...' rants, we realized that it is the cellphone network that has somehow screwed up its call routing.

    According to him, his caller ID showed his dad's phone number when it rang. I asked him to recite his dad's number and it turned out to be the same number that showed up on my caller ID...My guess is that his dad tried to phone him and that  the routing somehow got messed up. Why it had to be MY cellphone number (I don't know this guy or his dad at all), I wouldn't know. Also, his dad has a landline number. It's from a totally different network. Being a programmer, I don't even want to think about what sort of nasty error could possibly have caused this. Also, how did the system get the timing to work out so that we could both hear each other while obviously answering our phones at different times....?

    I'm suddenly curious as to how a cellphone company's call routing works.

    Just think about how romantic it would be to actually meet your soul mate that way. Kudos to my cellphone company for providing this free matchmaking service!

    I tried to jump to that post's thread to see what the fine forum dwellers had to say about it, but all I got was "Not Found: Forum Not Found".

    I guess the thread got overzealously modded out as if it were spam?



  • Is this thread to comment on the disappeared post or its content?

    A fun trick prank thing students morons at my alma mater used to do is call up the multiparty service on the phone system and dial up two people.  The two victims would get angry at each other, thinking the one had prank called the other and was playing dumb.  A similar thing could have happened here by accident, such that, rather than a bizarre reroute, a multiparty was accidentally activated by the original caller, but the original caller was dropped off due to lack of multiparty support.



  • @Zecc said:

    I guess the thread got overzealously modded out as if it were spam?

    Or Community Server had a retard moment, again.



  • @Xyro said:

    A similar thing could have happened here by accident, such that, rather than a bizarre reroute, a multiparty was accidentally activated by the original caller, but the original caller was dropped off due to lack of multiparty support.

    That sounds like the result of unimaginably horrible code, like the OP suggested:

    case REQUEST_MULTIPARTY:
    /* Call third party */
    if(!attemptCall(data->phone_number)) return false;
    if(!attach(currentCall, call)) return false;

    /* Connected, now confirm we were allowed to do that */<br>
    if(currentCall->permissions & PERM_MULTIPARTY)<br>
        return true;   /* phew! */<br>
    else /*ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit*/hangUp();<br>
    

    BTW, how do you post code properly on this thing?



  • @Zecc said:

    @Phillipus said:

    Being a programmer, I don't even want to think about what sort of nasty error could possibly have caused this. Also, how did the system get the timing to work out so that we could both hear each other while obviously answering our phones at different times....?


     

    In that case, never look at telephony code... It's usually a written using the common pattern "multithreaded event-based state-mangling machine of death". After a couple of years of working with telephony software, I'm amazed each time I get a call that's routed correctly.

    Another idea for the explanation: His father called him at the same time someone called you. Enter a strange state / race condition. You get the same channel he got reserved. In the best case, his father and your caller get disconnected, in the worst case, some exchange somewhere explodes.



  • @Joeyg said:

    That sounds like the result of unimaginably horrible code, like the OP suggested:

    case REQUEST_MULTIPARTY:
    /* Call third party */
    if(!attemptCall(data->phone_number)) return false; if(!attach(currentCall, call)) return false;
    /* Connected, now confirm we were allowed to do that */
    if(currentCall-&gt;permissions &amp; PERM_MULTIPARTY)
        return true;   /* phew! */
    else /*ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit*/hangUp();
    

    BTW, how do you post code properly on this thing?


    With HTML and <pre>


  • Garbage Person

    @viraptor said:

    In that case, never look at telephony code... It's usually a written using the common pattern "multithreaded event-based state-mangling machine of death". After a couple of years of working with telephony software, I'm amazed each time I get a call that's routed correctly.
    CODE SAMPLES. NAO. Seriously. That's what this site's for.



  • @Weng said:

    @viraptor said:

    In that case, never look at telephony code... It's usually a written using the common pattern "multithreaded event-based state-mangling machine of death". After a couple of years of working with telephony software, I'm amazed each time I get a call that's routed correctly.
    CODE SAMPLES. NAO. Seriously. That's what this site's for.

    Google "asterisk examples" (without quotes), or go to asterisk.org and checkout the source tree. Then read the first 100 or so lines of source. Then shoot yourself.

    "Multithreaded event-based state-mangling machine of death" is far more of a compliment than Asterisk and its ilk deserve. I always thought of it as "portal to hell created via code".



  • @Xyro said:

    A fun trick prank thing students morons at my alma mater used to do is call up the multiparty service on the phone system and dial up two people.  The two victims would get angry at each other, thinking the one had prank called the other and was playing dumb. 
     

    I worked at a place in high school where the policy was not to answer the phone too far after store hours. Callers would be dumped to an automated message after five rings that said that said "Thank you for calling. We are closed. Store hours are 8am until 8pm. Please try your call again in the morning.". Since this made it hard for employees to call in sick/late, they were instructed to ring once, hang up, and we'd call them back from the info on caller ID.

    Did people actually pay any attention to the message? No. They'd call over and over, annoying the crap out of us. We dealt with people like that by speed dialing a take out joint and conferencing the two lines together after a couple rings.

    You'd be surprised how many times we heard 'Dominos Pizza? I must've misdialed, I was calling Xxxxx. Anyway, can I get a large pepperoni and mushroom?"

    One woman called three times. We gave her pizza, then Chinese, and finally a burger joint. She said "Wow, I'm hungry all of a sudden." when the burger place picked up and proceeded to order. 



  • @NoOneImportant said:

    One woman called three times. We gave her pizza, then Chinese, and finally a burger joint. She said "Wow, I'm hungry all of a sudden." when the burger place picked up and proceeded to order. 

    you should've made paid advertisement contracts with those stores.



  • @NoOneImportant said:

    You'd be surprised how many times we heard 'Dominos Pizza? I must've misdialed, I was calling Xxxxx. Anyway, can I get a large pepperoni and mushroom?"
     

    Dominos Pizza once accidentally put our phone number on one of their fliers (it only needed two digits to be transposed).

    From the time it happened until the fliers were superseded I'd say 90% of the calls were for them.

    We tried explaining the mixup to callers and giving them the real number but the only thing that worked was taking the order, waiting 40 minutes for them to call back and then apologising and saying their pizza would be another hour.  They stopped calling after that.



  • Whenever I call some place and do something, I make it a point to ask "Do you guys deliver pizza?" or "I could go for a nice glass of scotch right about now" when they're required to ask "Anything else I can do for you?". Then again, I respond to "What can I get you today" with "Fillet Mingon, Chocolate Mousse, Nice Resiling."

     I was banned from a Jamba Juice at one point. That or a starbucks, I can't remember.



  • @RTapeLoadingError said:

    @NoOneImportant said:

    You'd be surprised how many times we heard 'Dominos Pizza? I must've misdialed, I was calling Xxxxx. Anyway, can I get a large pepperoni and mushroom?"
     

    Dominos Pizza once accidentally put our phone number on one of their fliers (it only needed two digits to be transposed).

     

    I used to work at Domino's Pizza. The number was 131888 and the main taxi number was 131008 (these are both national numbers and would route to the nearest store/call centre). Many late night calls were for taxis instead of pizza. (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).

    There was a WTF in the national number routing: one person in a city 120km away would always get our store: what made it worse that he lived in "Newtown" and both cities have a suburb called Newtown - we ended up giving him the direct number to his closest store.

    As for the OP: I saw the original message too and hit reply and got the same error. My first thought on reading the subject that it was spam. I was going to mention that my brother-in-law would dial his girlfriend from the address book in his phone and about a quarter of the time get a different person (always the same "other person" IMSMR). He did have a Philips Savvy until 2006 so that's probably why it didn't work properly!



  • @Zemm said:

    There was a WTF in the national number routing: one person in a city 120km away would always get our store: what made it worse that he lived in "Newtown" and both cities have a suburb called Newtown - we ended up giving him the direct number to his closest store.
     

    There's a sandwich shop next to where I work that's a bit like this. Every other day someone comes in and the sandwichmongers can't find his phone order, because he actually called in the order to the other instance of the same chain of sandwich shops, on the other side of town. Apparently the website lists the same contact information for both locations, but it's the phone number of one with the address of the other. The sandwichmongers have been trying to get the website changed for months without result.



  • @Zemm said:

    (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).
     

    ...how do you actually "dial" that, or translate/transpose/decode/whatever it to a phone number?



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @Zemm said:

    (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).
     

    ...how do you actually "dial" that, or translate/transpose/decode/whatever it to a phone number?

    Look at your phone. Does it have small letters on the dial buttons? like, a big 2 and small "abc" under it. Most cell phones have.

    You just press whatever character is corresponding to the letter, so in this case "D" is 3, M, N and O are 6 etc. Therefore DOMINOS=3664667, and the whole number is 1300 3664667

    In some countries this trick is quite common,  others use only magic numbers (111111, 12 12 12 12 etc).



  • @Indrora said:

    "I could go for a nice glass of scotch right about now" when they're required to ask "Anything else I can do for you?". Then again, I respond to "What can I get you today" with "Fillet Mingon, Chocolate Mousse, Nice Resiling."

    I read that as, "Flint Michigan, Chocolate Mousse, Nice Riesling".



  • Look at your phone. Does it have small letters on the dial buttons? like, a big 2 and small "abc" under it. Most cell phones have. You just press whatever character is corresponding to the letter, so in this case "D" is 3, M, N and O are 6 etc. Therefore DOMINOS=3664667, and the whole number is 1300 3664667

    /me looks at his Nokia E71.

    Like, WTF?..



  • @Kiss me I'm Polish said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @Zemm said:

    (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).
     

    ...how do you actually "dial" that, or translate/transpose/decode/whatever it to a phone number?

    Look at your phone. Does it have small letters on the dial buttons? like, a big 2 and small "abc" under it. Most cell phones have.

    You just press whatever character is corresponding to the letter, so in this case "D" is 3, M, N and O are 6 etc. Therefore DOMINOS=3664667, and the whole number is 1300 3664667

    In some countries this trick is quite common,  others use only magic numbers (111111, 12 12 12 12 etc).

     

     

    oh, so the problem was that i was expecting you to have fixed-length numbers (e.g. all phone numbers in my country must have 10 digits (exept a few special ones, offcourse), so applying this trick would be a little complicated...)



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @Kiss me I'm Polish said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @Zemm said:

    (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).
     

    ...how do you actually "dial" that, or translate/transpose/decode/whatever it to a phone number?

    Look at your phone. Does it have small letters on the dial buttons? like, a big 2 and small "abc" under it. Most cell phones have.

    You just press whatever character is corresponding to the letter, so in this case "D" is 3, M, N and O are 6 etc. Therefore DOMINOS=3664667, and the whole number is 1300 3664667

    In some countries this trick is quite common,  others use only magic numbers (111111, 12 12 12 12 etc).

     

     

    oh, so the problem was that i was expecting you to have fixed-length numbers (e.g. all phone numbers in my country must have 10 digits (exept a few special ones, offcourse), so applying this trick would be a little complicated...)

     

    In some countries, e.g. the United States, dialing additional digits after the entire phone number has been dialed has no effect. This is why you'll sometimes see U.S. phone numbers longer than 10 letters advertised: it doesn't do anything, and you don't have to dial the extra letters/digits, but it makes the whole thing easier to remember.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    Google "asterisk examples" (without quotes), or go to asterisk.org and checkout the source tree. Then read the first 100 or so lines of source. Then shoot yourself.

    "Multithreaded event-based state-mangling machine of death" is far more of a compliment than Asterisk and its ilk deserve. I always thought of it as "portal to hell created via code".

    +1 Insightful

    TRWTF is the warning "Avoiding initial deadlock."



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    oh, so the problem was that i was expecting you to have fixed-length numbers (e.g. all phone numbers in my country must have 10 digits (exept a few special ones, offcourse), so applying this trick would be a little complicated...)

     

    In some countries, e.g. the United States, dialing additional digits after the entire phone number has been dialed has no effect. This is why you'll sometimes see U.S. phone numbers longer than 10 letters advertised: it doesn't do anything, and you don't have to dial the extra letters/digits, but it makes the whole thing easier to remember.

     

    It's called "over-dialling". 1300 DOMINOS is actually an over-dial as 1300/1800 numbers have 10 digits total here in Australia. Other 13 numbers have 6 digits. Numbers beginning with "1" are "special".



  • @Zemm said:

    I used to work at Domino's Pizza. The number was 131888 and the main taxi number was 131008 (these are both national numbers and would route to the nearest store/call centre). Many late night calls were for taxis instead of pizza. (Domino's Australia now advertises 1300 DOMINOS so I guess this wouldn't happen as much now - it has been 5 years since I left).

    ... I don't watch much TV, but I thought it was still 131 888 on the vouchers they keep sending us. I'll have to check, I suppose.

    I certainly still call 131 888 if I'm calling from home. I have the direct store number for our local place on my mobile phone for when I want to pick up some pizza on the way home.

    ... and the direct number for another Domino's outlet, the local fish and chips shop, Wok in a Box, ...



  • @Indrora said:

    Then again, I respond to "What can I get you today" with "Fillet Mingon, Chocolate Mousse, Nice Resiling."
    That's evil. How could you have a meal like that with anything but a big red wine?

     



  • @barfoo said:

    That's evil. How could you have a meal like that with anything but a big red wine?
     

    Meh. I'm a food luddite, and don't rellay think a certain drink is best for a certain food. I prefer to not mix, which is totally hypocritical because I like fresh salads, and many types of asian food, which are mixes of pretty much everything edible and beyond.

    Nonetheless, when it's a non-mix food, like a nice bit of meat and various other food items, I eat them all separately, because I want the flavour of each to remain pure in my mouth.

    I don't like wine either, so that may be related. :)


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