COUNTYWIDE : Radio Contest Puts Phone System on Hold

If you picked up your phone about 3:45 p.m. Friday and got no dial tone, your phone most likely wasn’t out of order. And neither were you in The Twilight Zone.

You were simply experiencing a “slow dial tone” brought on because hundreds of people in Orange County were reaching for their phones about 3:45 p.m., trying to reach a radio station.

“It was the KIIS-FM contest,” explained Michael Runzler, spokesman for Pacific Bell in Orange County.

He noted that the Los Angeles radio station, about that time on Friday, had reached the finale of a listen-for-songs-and-phone-in contest. And apparently hundreds of people were, indeed, reaching out via their phones to try to touch someone at the station--and thus win a fancy car.

Meanwhile, Runzler said, the phone company began getting complaint calls from customers who were finding that they couldn’t immediately get a dial tone.

“It was scattered throughout the county,” he said. “People would pick up their phones and not hear the dial tone for a while. But if they’d waited, the dial tone eventually would have come on.

“This slow dial tone is what happens when there’s a flood of calls. The system shuts down so it won’t get overloaded.”

The station caused a similar slow dial tone in Orange County about four weeks ago, when it had another big phone-in contest, said Runzler.

These problems quickly clear up, he noted, when the winner is announced and people stop trying to call in. The most recent Orange County slowdown “was resolved within five minutes. . . . People who had called in about their phones not working were then calling back saying the phones were OK,” said Runzler.

So what prompted the telephonic gold rush?

“It was our contest for your choice of a Porsche, Jaguar, BMW or Corvette,” said a young woman at KIIS-FM, who declined to give her name.

“We’ve been telling everyone to listen to three songs that would be played in sequence--boom, boom, boom. This afternoon, about 3:45, those songs were played, and the 50th caller was the lucky one.”

Alas, for all the eager callers from Orange County--the winner was from Santa Monica.