Can one rely on areacode-000-0000 to be a nonexistent number? If so, I might put it in the first position of my autodialer, which sometimes gets triggered accidentally.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is interesting how numbers like that, such as 000-000-0000 are obviously incorrect, and are intended only as a way to defeat caller ID, yet some of the telcos -- SBC comes to mind -- refuse to do anything about it. SBC is much more dedicated to their large commercial accounts than they are the vast majority of their subscribers. For a period of a couple months I was receiving several calls daily (from AT&T of all people, and this was long before the merger of that company and Southwestern Bell) trying to collect on a bill from someone who had my special ring-ring number long before I had it.When it finally got to the point I had to make appeal to the chairman's office at SBC to try and get those calls stopped, the lady who took my call insisted there was nothing SBC could do. "And as long as they provide their number to you, we cannot stop their call merely because you subscribe to anonymous call rejection." I kept telling her they were not 'providing their number' to me; they were providing all zeros; but, according to SBC, that was good enough ... 'they are giving you a number'. I asked her why didn't telco do a database-dip on all obviously incorrect numbers, and decline those with no ID available. She said that was not how they did things. No, I guess not. It ended as a stalemate. I was free to either keep their service as is, or get my phone turned off. The way I settled it was to switch away from SBC to one of their competitors, which still did not eliminate the problem of people plugging in bogus numbers (to get around those of us who block _deliberatly withheld_ (using *67 before dialing) but it did eliminate the problem of ignorant people responding for the chairman. PAT]