Costa Mesa : For Business Owner, the Wrong Number Is 800

Phones were dancing off the hook in a normally quiet printing office Friday when callers from New York, trying to reach various cities in the United States, found themselves talking to Costa Mesa.

Beginning at 7:30 a.m., Products of Information Systems was inundated with more than 500 calls on its eight phone lines leased through Sprint. Some callers, although surprised by the connection with Southern California, asked about the weather here.

Harold Jasper, who owns the Costa Mesa company, said representatives of GTE-Sprint Communications Corp. in New York told him the problem would be fixed in half an hour, around 9 a.m. here. Jenay Southwick, a spokeswoman at Sprint’s headquarters in Burlingame, Calif., said the problem was with switching equipment in New York and that the company hoped to correct the problem by 5 p.m.

Jasper said all the calls were from New York City to various locations in the United States, including Long Island, New Jersey and Massachusetts. He said he unplugged the Sprint connection and was using five emergency battery-powered phones in an effort to get some work done.

The callers somehow all reached Jasper’s 800 number, meaning “they’re calling on my nickel,” he said. But Southwick said Jasper would not receive a 40-foot phone bill because Sprint would “alert customer service.”

“It’s been a fun experience, interesting,” Jasper said. The problem was that real customers couldn’t get through.