I spied a *free* direct network connection in my hotel room and thought that I’d give it a whirl. It was dead. I suppose I could have tried to reboot my machine or a few more tricks but it was late so I bailed and hooked up to the desk phone instead. I have a lengthy list of local dial-up numbers (admittedly some old ones) accumulated, one for each layover, so I clicked connect and disappeared to unpack my bag. I returned to grab my email to discover that the connection had failed: no answer. Hmmmmm. I decided to dial it again — this time listening for the handshake and or phone feedback through the rather feeble internal pc speaker. I wanted to make sure that the hotel phone wasn’t locked, that the modem was working, that number was still valid. I learned that the number did in fact did dial and was ringing numerous times but did not pick up. I was searching for a way to end the attempt (instead of waiting) when the phone picked up. I strained to hear, expecting a canned recorded message from Ma Bell saying that “the number you have dialed…” etc. but imagine my surprise to hear a rather live sleepy voice answer: “hello? hello? —– hello?”. I felt badly. At 1030 pm, I know I it would have been somewhat irritated. Shame that the phone company would stick a residence with a number formerly used by machines. You move into town and call the phone company for new service and they say sure, here’s a phone number that is available and in-active. When we rolled into town years ago we blindly accepted a number that, thru luck of the draw, happened to be one digit off from a local hotel. Can you imagine the occasional kinds of calls we get during the odd hours? Man! I thought that we had it bad but I see not. Maybe the pc could be used to sleuth a candidate phone number before we commit to live with it. Now — if I can just figure out how to get on-line…