I’ve Got The Blues

Stories of the listings of toll-free “hot lines” with typos, resulting in callers getting a “phone sex” service, are so numerous as to not even be unusual anymore. But two recent cases stand out from the crowd. The number for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Chicago, where one would call to report sexual harassment, turned out to have such a typo in Ameritech’s Chicago directory. It’s listed in the directory’s “Blue Pages”, and the error was not discovered for six months. Then there’s the phone sex company who got a new toll-free number — after a suicide hot line in Columbia, S.C., dropped it. The phone company accidentally left the listing in the Columbia phone book. “This is not the kind of message a suicidal person needs to hear,” said a spokeswoman for the Alliance for the Mentally Ill in South Carolina. The father of a boy who had recently attempted suicide complained, “How many... kids have called and got that kind of stuff and just said, Well, I give up’?” (UPI, AP) ...More likely it made them realize they had a reason to live after all.