Stupid traveler tricks II

This is something I will never do in a hotel room again. Ever.

By Don George

Aug 25, 2000 | Last week I introduced the Case of the Phony Phone Calls, in which I invited you to guess why dozens and dozens of local phone calls had been charged to my hotel account one night in Los Angeles when I was out of my room at dinner.

First of all, thank you for your enthusiastic responses! More than 450 of you sent me e-mails proposing a variety of explanations for the mysterious phone charges.

The main explanations fell into three categories.

One was some variation on an endless-redial theme, as in these e-mails:

"I think that the redial button was stuck on the phone, automatically redialing the same number until the next time the phone was used. Good guess?"

"The phone was trying to redial the last number you called automatically -- a feature that is offered in some areas of L.A."

"I think the hotel is using an AT&T service that automatically redials a busy number until you manually pick up the phone and dial another number."

Essentially, most of these speculated that my last phone call before leaving for dinner had not gone through, thereby triggering an automatic-redialing service that would keep trying until the call was completed. This was a good guess, but wrong.

Others suggested that an automatically redialing fax was to blame:

"My guess is you tried to send a fax before you went to dinner. You left without realizing it hadn't gone through (wrong number, whatever) but the machine diligently tried the number every five minutes until you returned and reclaimed the phone line to call your voice-mail."

I especially liked this particular e-mail because it went on to describe a mistake even more horrific than my own phone faux pas:

"I heard of a family, on NPR I think, that had a fax. One of their daughters tried to send a fax to a wrong number right before the family went on vacation. No one noticed, and the fax machine worked away for 10 days while the family was vacationing, redialing the number every three minutes. Worse, the number wasn't only wrong but very long distance as well. They have since cut back, possessing only an old dial telephone in the kitchen."

An old dial telephone -- that's my kind of family!

Alas, while the fax scenario makes a certain kind of ineluctable sense to me, this also was not the case.

Three other notes merit special mention.

One reader wrote:

"There is a Nigerian group of 'small-time' terrorists who will call the hotel and using a special trick with phone numbers and the hotel's main board will bounce off very expensive calls. Typically this is done by tricking the front desk clerk but can be done other ways -- the titles on the bill match the calls you made, but that is also a trick made to hide long-distance calls. Most hotel managers are aware of these tricks but do not want to be stuck with the bill, since the latest method devised by the terrorists is very difficult to untangle. And no, I'm not nuts. This is the truth as I have seen similar things myself."

Uh, Scully, can you look into this?

I like the progression -- the gradual unraveling -- in this second writer's theories:

"Your laptop was plugged into the phone line, and, as soon as you left the room, it became a sentient being and tried to dial up a connection, over and over again.

"Your phone was programmed to automatically call room service at 7 p.m. until someone answered ... or not.

"You are the only person to experience a Y2K-related phone glitch.

"Remember that kid you teased back in seventh grade? He's baaackkk."

That's hard to top, but this is my favorite of all the 450-plus notes:

"I would guess that you have your dial-up .exe set to retry the line every five minutes, or you have your mail program set to check your in box every five minutes. Either that or you really made all those calls and have created a false reality in order to avoid having to pay for your foolish actions. In which case, the maid was a government spy who used your laptop to access your top-secret files, and then, just to kick you in the ass, made page after page of one-minute calls to the same number. Could go either way if you ask me, and you did."

I thought that maid was suspicious!

The inspiring -- or depressing, depending on your point of view -- truth is that more than half of you who responded understood immediately what had baffled me.

Here's one writer who put it eloquently and simply: "You left your e-mail application running and the computer connected to the phone jack. The application was set to poll for new e-mail every five minutes. So it called, checked and found no new e-mail, then logged off and did this every five minutes until you came back and disconnected it to use the phone."

That sums it up beautifully: I use Eudora, and I have it programmed to check for new e-mail every five minutes. Way back in the mists of time, I also apparently configured it to automatically disconnect after it had searched for e-mail if it hadn't been connected to begin with.

At the hotel I had checked my e-mail one last time before going to dinner, then disconnected the computer's remote access connection, but I hadn't quit the e-mail program or turned off my computer.

So while I was off at the Cafe des Artistes happily quaffing goblets of cabernet sauvignon and scarfing down platters of filet mignon and french fries, my persevering Powerbook G3 was valiantly attempting to check my e-mail, every five minutes.

It would rouse itself to look for the mail and then, discovering that it was disconnected from the MindSpring server, would dial up the local access number that I had earlier typed into the settings and saved. It would huff and puff and finally pry open a PPP connection and then it would zealously scour the system for e-mail, find that I had none and disconnect. Over and over and over again.

I don't know about you, but I just don't go around thinking about these things most of the time. I'm much more prone to think about what I should wear to the Cafe des Artistes and just how many stars there are in that Hollywood sky and what I should do if Gwyneth Paltrow sits next to me.

Actually, I do know about you -- at least, 450 or so of you. And more than half of you apparently do think about such things. The good news is that only a few of you who solved the mystery felt the need to remind me just how stupid I had been. And many of you kindly confessed that you too had done similarly stupid things -- and had in fact been faced with bills of even more gargantuan and stupefying proportion on checkout. I love you!

The only prize I can offer all of you who guessed correctly, alas, is an invitation, all expenses unpaid, to accompany me on my next business trip and try to keep me out of this kind of trouble. But I guess that would spoil the fun, wouldn't it?

Next Page: Would the hotel let me off the hook?

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