Phone Company Smells a Rat in Cutoff of Service
If you could not reach directory assistance Friday, blame it on a rat.
Shortly before 5 a.m., a rat crawled into an electrical transformer on a pole outside the Buena Park computer center of Pacific Bell at Magnolia and Orangethorpe avenues and tripped several fuses, company spokesman Craig MacDonald said.
For the next hour, assistance calls to 411 from Orange, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties got a recorded message saying that service was temporarily down.
At about 10:20 a.m., the 411 lines failed again, this time for about half an hour. The cause of the second outage was not known, but the rat “is the prime suspect in both cases,” MacDonald said.
MacDonald said he figured a total of about 72,000 callers did not get through.
Southern California Edison Co. crews restored power and found the rat--described by MacDonald as a “charcoal briquette.”
The computer center, which handles only directory assistance, receives about 1.5 million calls a day.
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