Strange but true – telephone users in Los Angeles have been trying to dial local numbers, only to find themselves put through to France. A slip of the finger? Apparently not – Joshua Greenbaum, a freelance writer based in Paris has received eight different calls in the last month from callers in Los Angeles who dialled a local number. The final twist – which propels the affair into the Twilight Zone – came when a Los Angeles-based acquaintance tried to dial the facsimile machine on the desk next to him and found himself talking to his Paris-based buddy. The next day a call appeared on Greenbaum’s answering machine, a recorded conversation in which a Pacific Bell Inc operator explained to Greebaum’s Los Angeles chum that she had just tried to call the number, had got no connection and that anyway it is absolutely impossible to dial a seven-digit number in Los Angeles and get connected all the way to Paris, France. The problem seems to be a glitch in the implementation of a new Los Angeles area code: all of the callers who mistakenly got through to Greenbaum were trying to call a number within the new Los Angeles 310 area. The code for Paris is +331. Will the tangled tale ever get sorted? In the words of the immortalised PacBell operator Well, sir, I’ll just have to check into this.
