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Fantastic word game

Good Housekeeping is a magazine my mother used to, and probably still does, subscribe to but I've never read it because I'm way too busy keeping up with every article I can find everywhere else regarding the ever lovely Olivia Newton-John.

I guess I had to be the one to do it. 8)
 
The ever lovely Olivia Newton-John will always be TFWG's (or The FWG's as some prefer) goddess of entertainment.
 
Goddess of entertainment Olivia Newton-John, as much as we love her, and as much as I hate to admit it, would be no match for our Director of Fun, Miss Silkie.
 
Our Director of Fun, Miss Silkie didn't do what the Goddess of Entertainment, Her Majesty the Grand Lady Grytta of the Third House of Fox, did by inadvertantly introducing me to fone phreaking, by speaking up and hitting that magical note that'd reset the trunk and put control of the whole nation's telephone system at the mercy of the hands and mind of the intrepid young fone phreak.

[size=8pt]Granted, this was right at the tail end of the N2-carrier era around these parts, but better late than never.

So here's the whole backstory/epic saga: Waaaaay back before the dawn of digital trunks and out-of-band signalling, everything was analogue and usually in-band. The "talking" between switching offices was carried over the same voice path as your own speech was. This was how the American telephone network had been set up for decades. Well, by the early 1990s everything around my part of the Northwest that had anything to do at all with Ma Bell had been cut over to digital T-carrier trunks, which do all their call setup and signalling on a seperate data channel. You can sit there and blow 2600 Hz down your phone line all day long and it won't make the slightest bit of difference.

Naturally, there was one glaring exception: GTE. The trunks between Vancouver (specifically the Orchards central office) and Camas, in the late '80s and most of the '90s, were really weird (the fact that Camas was in GTE-land may have had something to do with it!) Normally we'd associate a trunk system like N2 with in-band signalling and "line whine", right? Well, at some point they'd transitioned the still-analogue Orchards-Camas N2 route to use out-of-band signalling, presumably to facilitate Signalling System 7 compatibility with Ma Bell, which had pretty much become the norm by that time. The result being there was no more line whine, or MF crosstalk or any of that stuff to be heard. Ergo, the impression was that out-of-band signalling no longer worked here; give up, throw away the blue boxes, pack it up and go, end of file, show's over, that's all folks.

Well, guess what? Sure enough, the Camas equipment still very much responded to 2600 Hz and even MF sequences even though it "really wasn't supposed to"! SS6/blue boxing lives! Talking to GTE people, right *in* the Camas CO building yet (CAMAWA01) as a squeaky-voiced pre-teenager revealled they didn't seem too interested in doing anything about it. Apparently the possibility of toll phraud by making phree long-distance fone calls via their network just didn't concern them any. (Not like Yours Truly'd ever think of doing that, of course! Riiiiiiight....... ;o) But like I said earlier, it would have been unreasonable to expect anything else in GTE-land....

They eventually fixed it by going over to T-carrier like everybody else back in...what, '97 or '98, I think. It really didn't make any huge improvement in the audio quality (CAMAWA01 to ORCHWA01's not really a long haul by any stretch of the imagination, so there weren't that many repeaters along the carrier route) but at least it did fix the "falsing" problem they always had in the analogue days. The CO in neighbouring city of Washougal (also in GTE-land) may have had the same situation going for it around that same time, but I didn't bother to try.

So now you know...the rest of the story.
 
At the mercy of the hands and mind of the intrepid young fone phreak, several Magic The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are typically misplaced, lost, stolen or torn in anguish or disgust during each weekend's play.
 
Misplaced, lost, stolen or torn in anguish or disgust during each weekend's play, enough of the Monopoly game set's pieces went missing to render the board quite useless resulting in it, along with the few remaining pieces, being chucked into the dumpster behind the old apartment building.
 
The dumpster behind the old apartment building is where I found these old airchecks of one "Jay Clark" from WXCT in Southington, CT.
 
This thread could be much further along if we had a lot more contributors but, since we don't, we rely on the core group of us to keep it going onto the next generation.
 
The next generation of kids are not going to get much from listening to the radio, but at least they will always be reminded of and able to refer to Megan McCormick's and Olivia Newton-John's contributions to society.
 
Megan McCormick's and Olivia Newton-John's contributions to society will be fondly remembered for contributing to the developments of all the band camp kiddies.
 


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