“She told Who Me?”
This managed to confuse me every time it was written, and it appeared a lot.
Racking up that large a phone bill with dialup internet is very impressive! Today if a 7 year old spends that kind of money it’s almost certainly because someone forgot to lock the app store/roblox account.
Trust me, it wasn’t. I did something similar as a kid, but only around $900… just needed to be located barely off zone (like, just a kilometer off) from your Internet provider, and use the Windows 95 dial up that’s a bit eager to add a “1” before the rest of the number… and voilà!
Grounded and cut for three months after the phone bill came in.
The computers I remember in my libraries back in the early 90s didn’t use internet, but a private dial-in network with a text/menu-driven interface sort of like a BBS.
Eventually, when they moved to the internet, there was a bit when it was reachable over telnet…I don’t know if that was intended or not but it made it very easy for me to search the catalog from home. It was never advertised, I just happened to notice the address on the terminals at the library and figured I’d give it a shot.
It wasn’t that hard. Don’t ask how I know. 5 cents a minute doesn’t seem like a lot even in 80s dollars, but…well, time flies… And it’s true, that bill only shows up once a month, by then the damage is done.
Parent wouldn’t want to change from 56k to cable.
Parent was shown the wonders of IRC.
One phone bill later… We’d better get cable.
Oh there are some details left out that I desperately need to have clarified.
- Wouldn’t the cost have been the same (perhaps more) if the exact same calls were being made during the day?
- What exactly was the bug, and how would it have been resolved?
- Did she get “fired”?
My guess is that the script ran repeatedly, even after a good connection was established. Telecom companies only billed whole minutes, so a call of 13:01 would be billed as 14 minutes. Or to put it simply, if her script made multiple calls every second, the library would get billed for multiple minutes per minute. If I made fifteen 1-second calls in a minute, I would get billed for 15 minutes of calls in that single minute.
Also, phone companies would typically bill a large flat fee for each long distance call. So making a ton of short calls was more expensive than a single long call. If her script was configured to reestablish the connection in between each upload (instead of simply starting it the once, then uploading multiple times), then the library would get billed a lot of those flat fees for each individual call.
I also found out the hard way that cell phone providers’ “free minutes” plans (back before virtually every phone plan had unlimited minutes) didn’t kick in if the call was started before the time. If your minutes were free after 8PM and you started a three hour call at 7:59, the entire call would be billed, instead of only the first minute.
Based on the description, my guess is that the script solved the problem of having the line interrupted by only doing a single 56k transaction per phone call.
Lots of times, phone calls were billed $$$ for the first minute and $ for every minute after that. If her script only did one transaction per call and not even using the full minute, that could add up fast.
And, given that it took a month for the bill to come, she could have been doing something wrong even during the day. Nobody would have noticed until the bill, and the 1am calls stood out the most when the bill finally came. Maybe there was a local exchange that didn’t require long distance?
I think the bug and the cost were not that the cost was different at that time of day, but that by running at night without worry of interruption her script ran multiple times doing upload after upload after upload. If it had been during the day they would only have a few succeed because the line would get interrupted or couldn’t be used. Maybe during the day they’d only succeed on 3-5 calls but at night the script was making 50, 60, maybe even 70 calls.
Also, I hate the name of the column. The frequent mention of the name “Who, Me?” just takes me out.
Also what appears to be a typo, Regomize, but is actually them merging “Register” and “anonymize”.
Phone services used to have “peak” and “off-peak” hours. Calls made after a certain time, say 7 or 8 in the evening would cost less than calls made during the day. So yes, if it had been during the day it would probably have been more expensive.
While not the same as phone bills, still today electricity changes in cost depending on the time of day. Electricity costs less in the middle of the night. It makes sense to have higher cost during peak demand when charging by usage and there is an impractical bandwidth limit.
