41–50 of 125 posts
Missed calls still signal a lot in this day and age. One example: you send a couple serious texts to a close friend or partner after an argument. They stay unread and you get no response. You then call and see if they pick up after a few rings. If not you hang up and wait or maybe write it off. If the other person is there (and often you know they are there monitoring their phone) maybe now they respond (via txt or c…
I wrote a "ring knocking" tool back in my college days so that I could connect to my Linux box at home from the labs at school since I was on dial-up. I'd go to the payphone, put in a quarter, call my line and let it ring the requisite number of times, hang up, get my quarter back, then go to the lab and check my school email account. The ringconnectd daemon would detect the rings, wait a few seconds, connect to my I…
At least it explains the "You only heard it ring once? I let it ring like five times before I hung up! Seriously!"-anecdotes I keep picking up. :)
I remember one mobile operator in late 2000s charged for a call only after first second. So we used to call each other, saying something really fast and hang up to not get charged.
Long before cell phones and answering machines my Dad was a pharmacist in a small town. He was happy to drive down to the drugstore when a customer called our home needing an after-hours refill, except on Sunday which was his recharge day. On Sundays we were instructed never to answer the phone unless it rang twice, paused, then rang again. Close family members knew the secret code; customers just learned Dad wasn't…
He doesn’t believe they realized he was half in the bag filling their prescriptions.
I remember doing this when I was a kid. We also had an understanding of the number of based on the number of rings, too: 1 ring and hang up was when my aunt got home and 2 rings was my cousin got home. They could call us long distance to let us know they got home OK.