Ringbacks and Other Tricks
When I was a kid in New York, I learned a couple of telephone tricks. One was that if you dialed 660, waited for a dialtone, dialed 6, waited again, and hung up twice, the phone would ring back a few seconds later. My friend Tommy and I used to do it to payphones — 660-dialtone-6-dialtone-6-hang up twice. Then we’d scoot away at let the phone ring.
Another trick was to dial 958. That would simply read back the phone number you were calling from to you. For a 12 year old, this was neat stuff.
Alas, the phone system has changed. Today, though, I was thinking about these. Dialing 660 (here in Columbus) did nothing, but dialing 958 got me a recording that ‘the number you dialed can’t be reached.’ So 958 is still something other than a normal exchange.
(I wonder why TV shows don’t use 958 as a fake exchange instead of using 555 all the time.)
Anyway, just for fun I looked online to see what the deal was (now) with 660 and 958. I found a great page at hackfaq.org that has all that stuff. It turns out that 114, 951, 954, and 957 are also special codes/exchanges.
What can you do with this? Not much. But I still think it’s cool that there are codes you can dial with your phone that do things other than you might expect.
