Story 2 in the "Funny ISP Story" series.
(From circa 1995, Avi Freedman, netaxs)


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I get to the netaxs office, walk past the old suit jackets hanging 
on the coat hook (we used to say they were from salesmen we'd eaten),
and go to my workstation by the batphone.  The batphone was the line
we gave our leased-line customers.  This story takes place before we
had a 24x7 NOC, so probably about 1995...

We had been in a 3-year battle with Bell over hunt groups.  First
we started with residential phone lines and hunt groups, but every 
time they looked at the account they broke the hunting.  Seriously,
there was some software problem where hitting "next screen" broke
the hunt.  We always joked about hiring some 2600-d00dz to go 
trashing and find the 5E passwords so we could set up a cron job
to dial in and reprogram our hunt groups every night.

We argued for years and they basically told us that the only way
to get reliable 100 line (or even 20 line) hunt groups was to buy
commercial service.

So we switch, figuring that at least hunting would work right.

Well, hunting worked just fine - dial the first line and it would
"hunt" down the set of lines to the first available phone line.

But it turns out that instead of implementing a proper "hunt group",
they just turned on call-forwarding from line 1 to line 2, line 2
to line 3, etc.

So what happened?

Every incoming call turned into an itemized $.08 call forward charge -
actually, one call forward charge for each line the call hunted 
through.

Not only did this generate a $16,000 phone bill, it generated a phone
bill, itemized at 20 lines per little sheet, of 200,000+ call forwards.

The amazing thing, of course, is that some Bell doober actually just
packaged it up and sent it to us.

So of course, I see a big UPS-delivered box sitting on my table, and
I am thinking "mmm, toys".  Modems, hard disks - really, not quite
sure what, but something fun to play with.

Then I open it, and I go from heart attack ($16,000 was probably about
1/3 of our monthly revenue at the time) to laughter to panic when I
realize that I will lose probably weeks of time fighting with Bell
to do it right and give us credits.

Fun fun.

Of course, nothing compared to the fun we were in for with MFS/Worldcom
a few years later.

- Avi