We have a large phone bill in our college district and assuming that a Centrex phone line might cost us $17 a month, and a DA call costs $1.75 per call, it's easy to see that 1 or two of these per month could add ten or twenty percent to our phone bill. So recently when we found that DA calls were costing us a significant amount per month, we had it disabled.
Well, some weasels in some departments got around that by calling 0 for operator, and having him/her forward the call to directory assistance! Well, this caused great dismay and consternation with my supervisor, and he resorted to calling the offenders and lecturing them about it. Some of the offenders claimed it wasn't them, and we can't prove it because all we know is that the DA call was made from the offender's phone, but not by the offender himself or herself. And the offender may be telling the truth, others may be doing the abuse.
Last month there was a trickle of DA calls, so it's somewhat under control, but I was wondering if anyone had further advice to offer. We're in Pac Bell / SBC land, if that's any help. Our BPX doesn't offer any feature to filter calls, all of that is with the Centrex line, and with SBC.
One thought I had was to put some monitor on the offender's line that would record the numbers dialed, assuming that the DA call would be quickly followed by the caller dialing the number DA gave. A few years ago we had one of those Radio Scrap line monitors that we put on a line for some legal purpose, and it printed out on a cash register tape for a month or so. I don't know what happened to that gizmo, but it would be nice if a more up-to-date model had a serial port and saved all the information to memory, and could be plugged into the PC and downloaded. Any ideas? Thanks.
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