NEBS

See Network Equipment-Building System.

Necrophony

Receiving phone calls from dead people (!)

Perhaps the strangest episode in the history of Computer Telephony magazine started one day when editor in chief Rick Luhmann told the staff that he wanted something amusing about telephony in each issue of the magazine, starting with the April 1997 issue. In years past the magazine s staff had thought about doing special April Fool s issue including a section called Computer Telepathy, but nothing had come of it. Indeed, the only major attempt at humor that has ever appeared in the magazine was an insert called CT Confidential, a tabloid-style send-up of CT Expo (and the entire CT industry, for that matter). Unfortunately, CT Confidential apparently had infuriated as many vendors as it had amused.

In any case, Yours Truly racked his brain in an effort to come up with something new that would be amusing yet not too inflammatory to our gentle readers (an impossibility, as it turned out, but let s not ruin a good story).

Suddenly a book came to mind that had been written by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless. Entitled Phone Calls from the Dead (New York: Berkeley, 1979) it is a compendium of anecdotes about alleged instances where people answer telephone calls, only to briefly hear words seemingly uttered by parties known to be deceased.

Yes, what a brilliant idea, I thought. We ll do an article on phone calls from the dead. Rick loved the idea.

Freelancer and obsessive...