Bluebird of happiness

One of my best friends moved to Alaska in August, and over the last few months I've had some strange errors when I try to call her. Two days ago I hit enough errors in a row that were SO CLEARLY weird that I decided to send an email to GCI, the main service provider in Anchorage, to find out what's up. The errors were things like:

* Dial her work number; am told in a twangy unfamiliar operator-voice, "We're sorry, you must now dial 1 before the area code when making local calls." Um. Anchorage, last I checked, was not a local call, and I did dial a 1. Dial again; managed to connect, with extremely poor audio.

* Dial her home number; an answering machine with an extremely bad connection. Later, dial it again and am told, "We're sorry, that number has been disconnected." Dial a third time immediately and again, the answering machine picks up with an extremely bad connection.

I should note that my phone keeps the number you have just dialed on display, so I can tell when I have or haven't dialed a wrong number.

Anyway, I've been playing email tag with GCI Dudes about this. Last night he called and said, hey, this is GCI Dude, if you could send us a test call to figure out what's up, just hanging up after it's rung a few times, we'd appreciate it. Today he emails me and says, could you make that test call? and I say, I did, at around 8:30 your time, and he says, Well, we have a call at that time from this number: 954-xxx-xxxx. That area code is in ... uh ... Broward County, FL.

I'm going to make another test call tonight just to see if the error is consistent, but right now I am really stumped. Has anyone else heard of a problem like this one with the switchboards? I've had occasional "wrong number" errors with other outgoing calls where I am pretty sure the "wrong" wasn't on my end, but never with the frequency of these Alaska attempts. At first I was annoyed but now I'm just really curious.

It is abnormally warm in my lab. Not the kind of abnormally warm where everyone's complaining because the AC isn't on yet. No, it is actually ninety degrees in here, and there is such a clear temperature gradient that when you open the door to the (windowless, warm) hallway you get a cool breeze, and when you close the door it is unbearable again after about two minutes. I feel awful for the subjects. At least they're only in here for 30 minutes apiece.