http://www.relaycall.com/national/relay.html
The possible uses of this service are endless. You could order a pizza without all that troublesome standing up to pick up the phone!
I'll let you decide what to use it for yourself.
(I can't use it, since it seems it can't dial canadian area codes)
Does anyone in the states want to try it?(I live in Canada also)
...I tried calling my home number. The call comes through as soon as you click connect. An operator answers the phone and reads the messages I type.
For anyone who has every called a relay service, this is exactly the same type of service provided for the hearing impaired - the person types their message and then "GA" meaning go-ahead, indicating that it is the other persons turn to talk. It is harder to trace, but there is an internet record of the caller's IP somewhere internally (in case anyone does call and make a bomb threat or harrasment or the like).
The number shows up on my caller id as "Tollfree Number 800-855-0000".
If anyone is hearing impaired, this is a good way to communicate via phone. One important thing to note is that the operator speaking to you changes every couple of minutes. This is in part for privacy, and to prevent any one operator from hearing too much of a given phone conversation.
Unless the person you are calling knows about these services, the recipient of the call may not know what to make of the operator passing conversation back and forth.
--DDTM
Ah, reminds me of the first relay call I was ever on the receiving end of. Doing tech support for a US ISP.
Keep in mind, that the idea was to get the person off the phone quickly. With 30 second or longer pauses for quick questions, especially if there were complicated instructions, the call took a while.
Ah.
My friend and I used this one day. We called almost everyone we new, including ourselves. THEY SAY ANYTHING YOU WANT! I tried talking to them, but they say it's against their rules. They are ROBOMEN.
Yeah, its funny to do at first, but hoenstly, i think that we shouldn't take advantage of something designed for handicapped people.
I also did support for macintosh microsoft products a few years ago and i HATED when people called in with tty calls.
Its not the fact that it was a tty call, the BIG problem is how you are supposed to wait til the operator signals the end of the sentence and you are not supposed to interrupt a sentemnce. so that made it very hard to say somethbing like "No, don't click the control panel, but click the extensions folder" while the cusotmer is talking. so you were repeating everything over and over.
horrible horrible long calls.
Also did you know that the operators are supposed to switch off every 10 minutes during a call with no warning? That really distracted me.
When i found out about it, i called myself to see if it was really what they said. If was fun talking to myself. At school we would go to computer labs for class and call cell phones to see who left theirs on. Since cell phones were not allowed, if it rang then they would get it taken away.
Exactly! While in college I worked the phone lines for a credit card company, and the first time I got a tty call really threw me for a loop. It was a deaf guy, but I didn't know he was deaf, and he had a female tty operator. I knew the caller was supposed to be male, but I heard this obviously female voice telling me that it was him speaking; I could NOT get her to do anything other than relay what the deaf guy wanted her to say, not even to verify that it was a tty service. We had to have the caller answer specific questions to verify that the caller was who they said they were, but we were to question the authenticity of the caller if it was obvious that the caller's voice didn't match the known gender of the customer. That was a memorable call!
This relay service gives me a great meeting ditch idea; use the service to call my cel phone while I'm in a meeting to give me a good reason to scoot out early. Or call the company front desk and have the operator page me. No more 3 hour anti-production meetings!
hmm, perhaps i could use this to cut out of a class a minute or two early.
I used to work at an electronic parts store - I would get people calling from "Zimbabwe" and asking for "500 VCRs" If we said that we didn't carry that, they would say, "what do you carry? Do you have computers?"
One wanted like 200 laptops, shipped overnight to Africa, and had multiple credit card numbers to distribute the funds across. No joke! I had at least 7 of these calls personally.
After a while, I got tired of these calls and would just say "this is fraud" and hang up. One of the callers responded that it wasn't. Yeah, right. Someone buying 200 dvd-rom drives calls a place that doesn't carry them. Instead of just ordering thru a supplier that does? Sure, that's it!
Here is an idea for the TTY service, use it to break up with your girlfriend.
You guys should be ashamed of yourselves. Abusing a service for the handicapped.