• (cs) in reply to Doug
    Doug:
    But in our case, it also had the special case of 9-1-disconnect, in which case it will assume you wanted to dial 9-1-1 but got murdered in the meantime. Or something like that.
    ARTHUR: There! Look!

    LANCELOT: What does it say?

    GALAHAD: What language is that?

    ARTHUR: Brother Maynard! You are a scholar.

    MAYNARD: It's Aramaic!

    GALAHAD: Of course! Joseph of Arimathea!

    LANCELOT: 'Course!

    ARTHUR: What does it say?

    MAYNARD: It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail by dialing 9-1-arrrrgghhh'.

    ARTHUR: What?

    MAYNARD: '...9-1-aaarrrrggh'.

    BEDEVERE: What is that?

    MAYNARD: He must have died while dialing it.

    LANCELOT: Oh, come on!

    MAYNARD: Well, that's what it says.

    ARTHUR: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just dial it!

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Has anybody mentioned that the country code for India is 91 not 11 yet? Also, has anybody speculated on what would happen if two fax machines with faxback faxed each other and got caught in an infinite loop?

    It's EVE Online

  • Fred (unregistered)

    All these messages going back and forth about loops of messages going back and forth and no one has mentioned the REAL wtf.

    Why, in this millennium, are we still expected to memorize and punch in a NUMBER when we want to connect to a machine halfway around the world? And not just some meaningless number like an IP address, either. We are expected to instruct the phone network which country to route to, then which area code, and so on.

    If only there were some kind of Distributed Naming System we could use to resolve human-compatible names to network-specific numbers...

    Captcha: acsi - four bit ASCII

  • Mike (unregistered)

    And this is one of the many reasons our fax lines weren't part of our phone system.

  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Fred
    Fred:
    ... If only there were some kind of Distributed Naming System we could use to resolve human-compatible names to network-specific numbers...

    Great, so I would have to renew my phone's name every year. I wonder how much the "good" phone names would go for.

    I actually like the idea, though.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    Doug:
    But in our case, it also had the special case of 9-1-disconnect, in which case it will assume you wanted to dial 9-1-1 but got murdered in the meantime. Or something like that.
    ARTHUR: There! Look!

    LANCELOT: What does it say?

    GALAHAD: What language is that?

    ARTHUR: Brother Maynard! You are a scholar.

    MAYNARD: It's Aramaic!

    GALAHAD: Of course! Joseph of Arimathea!

    LANCELOT: 'Course!

    ARTHUR: What does it say?

    MAYNARD: It reads, 'Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail by dialing 9-1-arrrrgghhh'.

    ARTHUR: What?

    MAYNARD: '...9-1-aaarrrrggh'.

    BEDEVERE: What is that?

    MAYNARD: He must have died while dialing it.

    LANCELOT: Oh, come on!

    MAYNARD: Well, that's what it says.

    ARTHUR: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't bother to carve 'aarrggh'. He'd just dial it!

    If only there were a +REP or "Like", I would have clicked it.

  • Fred (unregistered) in reply to Tom
    Tom:
    Fred:
    ... If only there were some kind of Distributed Naming System we could use to resolve human-compatible names to network-specific numbers...
    ...I wonder how much the "good" phone names would go for.
    You mean like 1-800-FLOWERS?

    800 is the "dot com" of the phone network.

  • PRMan (unregistered) in reply to Krunch
    Krunch:
    India prefix is +91 but New Delhi area is 11, which makes 9111.

    If this is the case, then it made no difference that the system required a 9. They probably dialed "9911" because they dialed a "9" and then the number on the caller ID return, which the Indians set as "91 11 ..."

  • fjf (unregistered) in reply to cdosrun
    cdosrun:
    I have no idea if calling 911 is a strict liability crime, civil violation, or what- But I suspect if they can fine security systems that call 911 inappropriately in that jurisdiction, they can fine the fax machine. (Or rather, the company that owns the fax machine, as the fax machine is unlikely to pay the fine)

    Why not? It could just fax some banknotes to the police.

  • Wine Snob (unregistered) in reply to Fred

    Try dialling that on many modern mobiles with qwert-esque keyboards.....

  • Jay (unregistered)

    So, umm, what exactly did the whole story about the fax-back system have to do with the ultimate problem? As numerous others have already pointed out that the dialing sequence described for dialing India is incorrect, the story is apparently somewhat garbled, so it's not clear if the problem was that the phone system made it impossible to dial India, the phone system made it impossible to dial any international number, or if the caller ID was giving incorrect numbers. Only the third of these possibilities as anything to do with the fax-back system, and that would only be a subset of the problem.

    So we were treated to a long story about this fax-back system -- yes, I too expected it to end with an infinite loop between two machines -- and then suddenly the punchline is only marginally releated. The ending of this story might as well have been, "And then the programmer slipped on a banana peel and fell!" for all it's relevance.

  • LenL (unregistered) in reply to Krunch
    Krunch:
    This story reminds me of my US colleagues who have no clue how to dial an international number.
    American international calls to Canada and to much of the Carribean are the same format as standard "within the US long distance" calls. Your American colleagues make those calls without any problem. Your ignorance of what constitutes an international call and the digits required to make one would, however, seem to be a problem. Yours.
  • Hatterson (unregistered) in reply to Wolfan
    Wolfan:
    I would think that both would work, No?

    Surprisingly this didn't end in someone getting charged with a felony; which is what it is when you call 911 falsely (at least in the US), and not surprisingly it took 3 times for the cops to stay around until they found out why the 911 call.

    Some of these WTFs are getting to seem like someone is just writing them and not real stories, losing some of their oomph.

    Dialing 911 by mistake is not a felony. Intentionally calling 911 with no reason however is (aka prank calling).

    We actually just had a situation like that at our office yesterday. One of the lines dialed 911 and hung up (obviously a dialing mistake) but when they tried to call back the line was busy and wasn't included in our hunt group. So they sent out a couple patrol cars.

    Long story short they just said "OK, check your phone system to see if something is wrong because if it happens 3 times we charge you" Charge being a fine, not in the criminal sense.

    Regarding the story: I fail to see the WTF here. A crappy faxback program didn't take into account 911 rules and forgot to make an exception...a little shortsighted but hardly a WTF.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    It seems to me the police left awfully easily the first two times.

    I once had the police show up at the door of my home saying that they had received a 911 call from this address, but that then the caller hung up without saying anything. I said I hadn't called them, my wife hadn't called them, I called to my children and they all seemed all right. The police said "sorry to bother you" and left. Nothing was wrong so this was the easy solution, but I wonder ... what if there had been some crazed killer hiding behind the door pointing a gun at my head who had just said, "Get rid of the police or I'll blow your brains out" ? Or for that matter, how did they know that I actually lived here, and that I was not the crazed killer and I had the homeowner and his family lying bleeding to death in the basement?

    I don't doubt that a large percentage of 911 calls are someone mis-dialing or kids playing with the phone or whatever, but I'd think the system loses a lot of its value if all it takes is one person to say "No problem here officer" and the police leave. Maybe the police are good at judging people. I understand they often make decisions based on subjective factors like "she seemed really nervous" or "he didn't look like he belonged in this neighborhood".

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Wolfan
    Wolfan:
    I would think that both would work, No?

    Surprisingly this didn't end in someone getting charged with a felony; which is what it is when you call 911 falsely (at least in the US), and not surprisingly it took 3 times for the cops to stay around until they found out why the 911 call.

    Some of these WTFs are getting to seem like someone is just writing them and not real stories, losing some of their oomph.

    I certainly don't think that our government is particularly rational, but the idea of sending someone to jail for 5 years because his finger slipped while dialing and he accidentally called 911 seems a little crazy even for a Democrat administration.

    I haven't bothered to look up the actual law on this subject, but I strongly suspect there's a distinction betwee mistakes, deliberate prank calls, and calls intended to divert the police from responding to a real crime.

  • Spike (unregistered) in reply to Chuck Berry
    Chuck Berry:
    PS: What do I do with the captcha if I am a robot?

    Forward the image to India where a human will be pait 1/1000th of a cent to decode it for you.

  • Joey (unregistered)

    In my country it's mandatory that emergency services are reachable without dialing any prefix...

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Wolfan:
    I would think that both would work, No?

    Surprisingly this didn't end in someone getting charged with a felony; which is what it is when you call 911 falsely (at least in the US), and not surprisingly it took 3 times for the cops to stay around until they found out why the 911 call.

    Some of these WTFs are getting to seem like someone is just writing them and not real stories, losing some of their oomph.

    I certainly don't think that our government is particularly rational, but the idea of sending someone to jail for 5 years because his finger slipped while dialing and he accidentally called 911 seems a little crazy even for a Democrat administration.

    I haven't bothered to look up the actual law on this subject, but I strongly suspect there's a distinction betwee mistakes, deliberate prank calls, and calls intended to divert the police from responding to a real crime.

    As has already been mentioned multiple times, dialing 911 by accident is not a crime anywhere in the United States.

  • AK (unregistered)

    India country code is 91. New Delhi area code is 11.

    The FaxBack should've been dialing 9911xxxxxxxx. Perhaps, on dialing 9911, the damn box didn't care what came after it. WTF?

  • Vivin (unregistered)
    and then India's international country code of 11, a "special case" rule in the the telecom system kicked in.

    India's country code is actually 91 :)

  • Hatterson (unregistered) in reply to AK
    AK:
    India country code is 91. New Delhi area code is 11.

    The FaxBack should've been dialing 9911xxxxxxxx. Perhaps, on dialing 9911, the damn box didn't care what came after it. WTF?

    You're right, it wouldn't have cared what came after. Nor should it.

    I am unsure of the exact legal specifications but new phone systems must have 911 support. If I reach over to my phone and hit 911 right now it really doesn't matter what I hit after that it will call 911. A 911 'special' case is supposed to be overriding, that's the point of it.

  • Contra (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    I think I love you, but what am I so afraid of?

  • Phil Barrett (unregistered)

    Can't be true as written, since the international prefix for India is +91, not +11.

  • wintermute (unregistered) in reply to Hatterson
    Hatterson:
    AK:
    India country code is 91. New Delhi area code is 11.

    The FaxBack should've been dialing 9911xxxxxxxx. Perhaps, on dialing 9911, the damn box didn't care what came after it. WTF?

    You're right, it wouldn't have cared what came after. Nor should it.

    I am unsure of the exact legal specifications but new phone systems must have 911 support. If I reach over to my phone and hit 911 right now it really doesn't matter what I hit after that it will call 911. A 911 'special' case is supposed to be overriding, that's the point of it.

    But it should care about what comes before it. Specifically, the 011 that routes it as an international call. "9 011 91 11 xxxxxxxx" should never trigger a call to 911.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    I certainly don't think that our government is particularly rational, but the idea of sending someone to jail for 5 years because his finger slipped while dialing and he accidentally called 911 seems a little crazy even for a Democrat administration.

    Obvious troll is obvious.

  • (cs) in reply to Usher
    Usher:
    Tom Woolf:
    Ian:
    So what if the fax failed at sending the error report, so it sent an error report, which then failed, so it sent another report, which then failed, so it sent another report...

    A coworker had a similar situation with email that almost took our servers down. She left town with an automated "I'm not in the office" reply set up. She also received daily emails from an online coupon company. Her "I'm not in the office" was responded to with "Do not reply to this email address, it is not monitored", which in turn received the "I'm not in the office"...

    9,000 sent and 9,000 received emails later, her email account was shut off.

    Shortly thereafter, we upgraded to an email system that recognized when it had already responded with one "out of office" email and did not send a 2nd (or 3rd, or 9,000th).

    MS Exchange will only send an out-of-office once per day to each sender.

    I'm not so sure about that. I recently had a user set up an auto-reply rule in Outlook before leaving for a week. Shortly after she left, she got some lame e-mail newsletter with an invalid reply-to address. This mail was dutifully replied to, but bounced back with an undeliverable message, which was dutifully replied to, but bounced back with an undeliverable message. This repeated untold thousands of times until the Exchange server ran out of hard drive space.

  • Justin (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates

    HAHA, just watched that episode last night!

  • Ryan G (unregistered)

    Been there, done that. Only it was humans doing the faxing to India and not a machine on automatic. Our fax machine line no longer requires dialing 9 ever.

  • chunder thunder (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    I'm an IT guy that fixes computers at all kinds of random places. And I can attest that ALL law offices have an old fax machine. And they ALL hate software based solutions that run on a filesystem.
    I'm a technically-minded engineering type and I attest that I personally strongly prefer a fax machine for sending a short signed document point to point. It just works, and there are no problems with file formats, etc. Sure, the quality is poor (though better than it used to be), but for what it, I haven't been impressed by the software alternatives. No need to complicate the process if the old tech works well enough.
  • farthead (unregistered) in reply to thatsodd

    exactly. those who worte the faxback were simply uneducated in how the phones worked

  • Joey (unregistered)

    Thats "special case" is actually pretty std on most telcom systems.

    However the logic is usualy a little deeper.

    You want to catch the 911 dialed by someone in a panic situation who reaches and grabs ..

    So the telcom /pbx / whatever should only treat it as a special case if the second digit, the 1 in this case ,is heard before the release of dial tone ( the change in tone from internal to 'real dial tone'

  • bananas (unregistered) in reply to Timothy Baldridge
    Timothy Baldridge:
    everythingdaniel:
    Wait, so dial '9' to get out, so the outside world only sees '11'? Or the internal phone system recognizes 911 internally and forwards it? Makes no sense to me...

    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?

    If the phone has a big red sticker saying "DIAL 9911 IN EMERGENCY", I should hope so.

    Captcha: sino... I think you meant sin(o).

  • Tzafrir Cohen (unregistered) in reply to silent d
    silent d:
    The obvious solution here is a phone keypad that goes to 11.
    You already have such a key in your keypad.

    http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/SIP+DTMF+Signalling '*' is 10 (0xA), and # is 11 (0xB). To make things further complicated, there are four more standard tones, called 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D', whose codes are 0xC, 0xD, 0xE and 0xF, accordingly.

    And then you have 16 (0x10) which is reserved for transferring the signalling event of "flash".

    One common encoding of a caller ID number is a sequence of DTMF digits, where the first is C and the last is D (thus you can be sure they are not part of the number).

  • Bob (unregistered)

    In the UK (where 999 is the "official" relevant number) only the first two digits are generally required.

    This has two advantages:

    • When in an internal system 999 is still enough to get to the emergency services.
    • With old rotary dial phones 99 starts the connection, the third 9 keeps you busy, so that by the time you finish dialling the operator is already there.
  • justsomedude (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    If there is a flaw here, it's with the PBX. The rest of the story is just fluff.

    OOHH I love it when you talk dirty!

    CAPTCHA: modo - the beginnings of a phone company.

  • Spud (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Totally incorrect. Autralia uses 000 for all their emergency services. Want to know who else uses 0 as the first digit of their emergency numbers? Here's an incomplete list:

    Azerbaijan Belarus Christmas Island Cocos Islands Egypt Georgia Kazakhstan Latvia Lithuania Norfolk Islands Tasmania

    ... I could go on but I'm sure you get the point.

    Do you mean Australia? You know Tasmania is part of Australia, right?

  • (cs)

    Our users still choose fax over scan/upload (about 70% to 30%). I think a lot of them send from work, where you're much more likely to find a fax machine than a scanner from my experience.

  • fjf (unregistered) in reply to bananas
    bananas:
    Timothy Baldridge:
    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?
    If the phone has a big red sticker saying "DIAL 9911 IN EMERGENCY", I should hope so.
    • Smoke-filled room
    • Complete power outage (no emergency lights)
    • Blind person
    • Eye contact with acid
    • ...

    Should I go on?

  • daqq (unregistered)

    In the middle of the article, I was allmost certain that I knew the WTF - someone else had FaxBack installed aswell - user A, and user B. A sent a fax to B, the transmission failed, B automatically sent a fax to A, but since the problem did not magically disapear (part faulty hardware, datastealing gremlins or something), the fax about the error to A came out also bad. A sent an error report about not receiving properly the error report from B, and so to infinity... oh well, the real WTF was also amusing.

  • fred (unregistered) in reply to Buffalo
    Buffalo:
    Usher:

    MS Exchange will only send an out-of-office once per day to each sender.

    ...This repeated untold thousands of times until the Exchange server ran out of hard drive space.

    You either have a very old Exchange server, or it is not configured correctly.

    As has been pointed out here, this was not a problem that was obvious to everyone until it happened: after it happened software was updated to prevent it

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Sanderman:
    This whole thing could have been avoided by using 0 as the dial-out digit. What emergency number starts with a 0? None.
    Totally incorrect. Autralia uses 000 for all their emergency services.

    And to add insult, most phone systems here in Australia use "0" for the external line anyway! :) Same thing could happen when dialling internationally, since the international access code is 0011.

  • (cs) in reply to Phil Barrett
    Phil Barrett:
    Can't be true as written, since the international prefix for India is +91, not +11.

    The area code for Delhi/New Delhi is 11, so internationally it would be written +9111xxxxxxxx. Still trips the special case.

  • David F (unregistered) in reply to Sanderman

    In australia the emergency number is 000 :P

  • Phone guy (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    So, umm, what exactly did the whole story about the fax-back system have to do with the ultimate problem?
    Bob:
    thatsodd:
    That is a little odd. International access requires dialing 011 first, then the country code is 91 for India, then area codes etc. So the fax back should have been 9-011-91....

    This story doesn't add up...just like the quoted user posted, the international code is 011, not 11.

    Krunch:
    India prefix is +91 but New Delhi area is 11, which makes 9111. However if I understand the setup correctly, it should have dialed 9 011 9111... which

    1. It's going through a phone system. You have no idea how the phone system dials long distance numbers. Phone systems are designed to do long distance routing to save toll costs. It's one of the features. Anything about how the phone system will dial long distance numbers is just a guess.

    2. It's not using caller-id. Caller-id doesn't work for international calls

    3. It's not using caller-id. You have to pay extra to get your phone system to work with caller id. It's extra cost, and probably requires ISDN. It's not like your home phone or your cell phone. I don't know why they can't do it like your home phone or your cell phone, but they don't. And anyway.

    4. It's using the fax handshaking to get the fax number. It's easy and standard.

    5. The fax handshaking use the number the sender provides. In this case, 91 11 xxxxx. that is, India, Delhi.

    6. Fax callback is a standard feature of the fax standards. It can be used for errors, or for security, or scheduling, or to get the other end to pay for the call cost.

    No caller id. No international prefix. No special toll routing. Just a fax call-back system that fails because it doesn't understand international numbers, and depends on user configuration. Connected through a phone system that dosn't understand international numbers, and depends on user configuration.

    In other words, a typical, ordinary, WTF: how did that happen? What is it doing? and "That's funny... it's never done that before..."

    farthead:
    I guess the software writers should know more about phone lines and phone systems.
    Hey! So now you do...
  • (cs) in reply to Phone guy

    What if someone misconfigured their fax machine! Set it to some 1900 number that you get money from, dial this service and cause it to fail. Profit.

  • Fred (unregistered) in reply to fjf
    fjf:
    bananas:
    Timothy Baldridge:
    But on the other hand, are you going to remember to dial 9911 when there's someone dieing on the floor next to you?
    If the phone has a big red sticker saying "DIAL 9911 IN EMERGENCY", I should hope so.
    • Smoke-filled room
    • Complete power outage (no emergency lights)
    • Blind person
    • Eye contact with acid
    • ...

    Should I go on?

    I'd really recommend against documenting those as use cases, or else we're going to have to test under those scenarios.

  • Tom Leys (unregistered)

    And here I was expecting to read about two faxes happily faxing error messages to each over through a noisy line ad-infinitum.

  • swschrad (unregistered)

    two lovely WTFs.

    1. send and receive in parallel, right? WTF. to do that you need two phone lines. did your setup program take the receive line # and assign it to the sender?

    2. telco switch. it is a general rule that 911 cuts straight through. we have to dial 9 to get an outside line too, as well as 1 to get long distance, as the network demands. if you happen to have a stuttering silly finger or a goofy keyswitch, you all of a sudden are talking to emergency dispatch. around these parts, we start telling how we got to them, they get it and accept the apology without sending a freakin' big bill for a bogus emergency call. ymmv.

  • Quirkafleeg (unregistered) in reply to MuTaTeD
    MuTaTeD:
    To dial out to India or any other international location you need to dial 00 or 01, so you would be required to dial 9-00-91-(city code)-(phone number)
    What if the number is for a location which is not in a city?

    This reminds me of address forms with ‘city’ fields. I don't live in a city, my postal address does not contain the name of any city, so why the smeeee should I be required fill that field in?

  • Michael (unregistered) in reply to fjf
    fjf:
    - Smoke-filled room - Complete power outage (no emergency lights) - Blind person - Eye contact with acid - ...

    With the exception of the blind person (and I'm pretty sure there are laws or guidelines concerning this - I'd expect them to require training for all employees, though):

    Do you really want to rely on a phone in any of these circumstances?

Leave a comment on “Emergency Faxes”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article