So if you knew the building, and you knew which room someone lived in, you knew the number. Campus telecom never changed this up at ALL.

Well, in the summer of '89 they built a new rec center, and it obviously got new numbers. And the number they put at the racquetball court reservation desk was one digit off from M's number.

He got racquetball calls ALL THE TIME, but the ones that annoyed him were very early in the morning. He complained to Telecom, but they wouldn't help, so he did what your little old lady did: he started taking reservations -- and to make it worse, he gave out confirmation numbers.

The rec center didn't have a confirmation number system.

After about a week, the racquetball center got a new phone number. Which is hilarious and shows how stuck campus telecom was in their thinking, bc it would've been way simpler (you'd think, anyway) to give M and new number given how much printed matter had the racquetball number on it by then.

I will never ever understand this behavior (I've seen it in other contexts) of people who refuse to believe an inconvenient truth even when there is strong disincentive for the bearer to be lying, and immediate negative consequences for not recognizing the truth. Like, do they think the receptionist is just pulling a prank??