strange phone issue

[nuclearpolymer]

One of my coworkers just tried calling me twice on my cell phone and got a "the phone number you have called is not in service" message. I tried calling from my office phone, and it worked fine. I know the coworker has the right number, because he's called me on my cell before, and because I checked the number in his phone after the first time. He

Comments

[narya]

Is it possible that you accidentally blocked his number (or that Sprint did) for some reason?

[dcltdw]

If it was twice in rapid succession, my guess is that it's a transient network failure. My guess is that, as much as possible, errors are blamed on someone else, so that users don't get annoyed. For instance, if you use your cellphone to call your landline, you'll hear ringing, even though your landline doesn't ring. I'm pretty sure that if you let it ring once (maybe twice) and hangup, your landline won't peep.

Which leads me to conclude that the phone is frantically trying to connect during that interim. Sometimes the person I'm calling will never go to voicemail: another case of hiding errors as something else.

But I don't actually know.