18 Jun
2011
18 Jun
'11
2:10 p.m.
On 6/18/11 9:54 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I was not aware that emergency phones in lifts in the
UK were attached
to the PSTN in a way you could gain control of the line. My
understanding (which could be inaccurate, I admit) is that in the
States, either the phone rings an internal maintenance number (for
buildings that are staffed 24/7, and that may be an obsolete practice
by now anyway) or it autodials to some off-site service that may
eventually result in someone being sent to the site. You don't now
nor ever did have a way of getting a dial tone.
No, you can easily get a dialtone. I've done it.
In 1993, my company (Digex) was in very stiff competition with UUnet
Technologies. It was outright war. At the time they had periodic "open
house" gatherings that only their customers were welcome to attend. We
purchased their cheapest service, a dialup UUCP news feed, which
afforded us the right to attend the next open house.
After eating a very large quantity of baked beans, ("fire for
effect!") a few of us, including our president Doug Humphrey, headed
over to Virginia to rub elbows with our mortal enemies.
It so happened that all of us were "men of mass", who were all quite
experienced in the art of elevator manipulation ('vator surfing, etc),
so we were sorely tempted to get into some mischief on our way out of
the building. We walked into an elevator, along with some random guy
leaving his workday from some other company in the building, and we
happened to notice that the elevator was particularly "bouncy"...so we
bounced it.
A lot.
The elevator control system noticed this and froze the elevator.
Between floors, as luck would have it. So we used the emergency phone,
which was configured to auto-dial the 24hr service number of the
elevator maintenance company, and told them what was up. They
dispatched a van, which we were told would take about 1.5hrs to get there.
I noticed that the random guy in the elevator with us was carrying an
HT (a handheld ham radio transceiver). It was, as I recall, a Yaesu
FT-470, a 2m/440MHz radio with a DTMF keypad.
I had an idea.
We picked up the elevator's emergency phone and immediately started
"flashing" the hook. If you do this with the right timing, you can get
a dialtone. I asked the stranger for his HT, tuned it to an unused
frequency, turned up the volume, keyed the transmitter, placed the
elevator emergency phone's microphone next to the radio's speaker, and
dialed "411". We got the number for the nearest Domino's (a crappy US
pizza delivery chain), called that using the same method, and ordered a
pizza. We requested that it be delivered to that address, "to the
northeast elevator, between floors 4 and 5". We described our situation
to the Domino's guy, he seemed to believe us, and said our pizza would
be on its way shortly.
Sadly, he obviously didn't believe us, and the pizza never arrived,
and we left the elevator when the service guy showed up and reset the
controller.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL