U.S. Agencies Cut Out Dialing for Time, Jokes

WASHINGTON — In an effort to cut Uncle Sam’s multimillion-dollar telephone bill, federal agencies this week began electronically blocking 145,000 of the 230,000 phones in government offices in the Washington area to make it impossible for workers to dial time, weather or other prerecorded messages such as Dial-a-Joke.

The government expects to save more than $300,000 on its telephone bill through the cutoffs, GSA regional Director of Public Affairs Dale Bruce said today.

“It’s the unnecessary calls to the recordings that we’re concerned about. We don’t, nor do we want to, monitor calls,” Bruce said. He noted that the government was billed about $250,000 for weather and time-check calls and $40,000 to recorded messages last year.

Charges for dial-a-number calls--there are 18 listed in the District telephone white pages including “Dial-a-Saint,” Dial-an-Atheist” and “Dial-a-Shrink”--range from 20 cents to $1 each.

The government began blocking 145,000 lines Monday and will curb an additional 26,000 federal phones later this year, officials said. A similar system was instituted last year at most federal offices in New York and Chicago, where there is a high concentration of federal employees and a sophisticated phone system.