Long distance calls not going out today?

[Steelbanger]

I've been trying to call Midsouth Shooters since 9 this morning and I keep getting a recording that all circuits are busy and to try again later. These calls are from my home in PA and going to TN. My phone provider is Verizon. I hope this isn't the beginning of some sinister plot.

And this from Midsouth's site.

phones_down.jpg

[mark08]

I would suspect your local phone office's toll circuits. report it if you haven't already.

[stew71]

Or some idiot with a backhoe cut buried landlines. Happens all the time.

[pwl44m]

Or some idiot with a backhoe cut buried landlines. Happens all the time.

How can that happen ? Ur spose to "Call before You dig" 1-800-USA
Perry

[jeepnik]

Or some idiot with a backhoe cut buried landlines. Happens all the time.

Hey, I thought "dig alert" was supposed to prevent such happenings. Of course that only works if they actually know where the lines are buried, and someone calls ahead of time to ask.

Once saw what happens when you stick a backhoe into a 14" natural gas line. It was fine, right up to the time something lit it off. The aerial detonation flattened one building, and blew out windows for blocks. The darned backhoe was spreading the flame, so we hooked onto it with a winch cable and pulled it out. After that it was just a nice straight flame shooting up quite a distance, and loud as all get out. Took about three hours to get the gas shut off and line to depressure.

[wecsoger]

I know that guy, he's "Backhoe Bob", and he seems to travel all across the country.

My company has nationwide locations, and I work in the voice/network side, so we've seen outages on an irregular basis. A local CO (central office) may have a bad line card that cuts voice channels and compromises my facilities long distance calls. A train wreck on the east coast happens to rip out several fiber optic cables and long distance cell service in a region disappears. I've got a facility in Louisville that works perfectly except they can not call one local number. It's something to do with the local telco, but we never could get a straight answer from them. So we did programming magic in the background and re-routed that call through our network.

It's funny how much we depend on the nationwide network and how fragile it seems sometimes.

[J35]

Seen my neighbor cut a pretty big bundle of underground phone wires he tried to make a joke out of it by picking up one end and pretending to talk into it and held the other end to his ear only he touched his ear and it shocked the stuff out of him

---J

[jeepnik]

Seen my neighbor cut a pretty big bundle of underground phone wires he tried to make a joke out of it by picking up one end and pretending to talk into it and held the other end to his ear only he touched his ear and it shocked the stuff out of him

---J

Karma baby, karma!