Dan Swartzman still shudders when he talks about the recent morning his office telephone rang at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “I picked it up,” he says, “and was greeted by the high-pitched whine of a fax machine trying to handshake with me. Since I wasn’t a fellow fax machine, I hung up.” Three minutes later, the phone rang again; once more, the yodeling tone, once more, Swartzman hung up. But in three minutes, it called again.
“Someone had set their fax machine on automatic redial so if it didn’t get through, it would make another try after a prescribed interval,” Swartzman says. “The only problem was, they had entered the wrong phone number and then forgotten about it.”
This torture went on for the next six hours. Every three minutes, Swartzman’s phone would ring, and he would have to pick it up or it would ring indefinitely. “It finally drove me out of the office,” he says.
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Swartzman joins a growing band of infovictims, people who’ve come to harm along the information superhighway.
On the theory that we’re all feeling impotent in the face of our machines, I invite you to share similar tales with readers. Send letters to the Big Beeper, c/o baiduhai Magazine, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.