How could a landline be re-routed?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. this happened to me.. i kept getting calls from one phone number always at times i was not home. i kept trying it for months until one day i tried it from work. then someone answered it and i heard sounds from the building i was working in! i ran down to where it was and saw an abandoned phone off the hook. someone said an off-premise extension might have been used. It seems as if someone was routing calls through a third party or being intercepted at my house, as many friends, including those with ties to law enforcement, commented on my phone being tapped. another time i had a lucent digital answering machine that was powered OFF and the phone rang several times. The machine turned ON and an intercom feature in the unit was activated. i have never had criminal issues so i feel my phone line was violated and wonder what may have happened.

A. Relax. The old Lucent answering machine is designed to turn on after 10 rings in case you left it off. It also has the listen in feature. Read the manual on that one. As for the line, it sounds like you live fairly close to your office. Contrary to popular belief, there is not a single pair of wires that runs from your home to the central office. Your line could have been assigned a pair that was not dead at the other end. A call to the telco should get things sorted out. Actually the pair from your home to the CO is a collection of pairs connected to one another. Pair from house to street cable connected at pole or underground pedestal. The street cable is connected to a larger cable that runs along a major street and so on to create a single pair back to the CO. Of course, that's the old fashoned way. Now you are likely to be connected to a fibre concentrator well before hitting the CO. What I mean is this: Let's say that I live at 123 Maple St. and you live at 234 Maple St. There is a 100 pair cable serving the street. I have a phone number that comes to me on pair 57 of that cable but I have it disconnected because I'm happy using just my cellphone now. You order a new line from the telco. They assign your number to what is now a vacant pair on that cable, pair 57. The installer connects your drop cable to pair 57 at the pedestal and voila, you have phone service. If I leave my old dead phone plugged in and the installer doesn't stop at my place to disconnect my drop from pair 57 then I too have your new phone number working at my place. This happens far more often than the telcos will admit. It is a real problem in office buildings. I can't tell you how often I've found other companies lines appearing in a suite that isn't theirs.

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