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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

I remember

① buying a can of this from a vending machine at MIT, when I visited while I was in high school

② occasionally calling 1-800-I-FEEL-OK, especially to test out a phone or something

I just called this number to try it out. It's a phone sex line now. There are supposedly hot girls for guys to talk to, but I didn't investigate the veracity of this claim.

I will volunteer to perform this hard hitting investigate journalism.

Now I have two questions:

1. Is the sort of thing ever outsourced to, for example, India? Or wherever else is a common place for call centres if it’s no longer there.

2. Is anyone currently doing this with chat bots and speech synthesisers?

>> 1. Is the sort of thing ever outsourced to, for example, India? Or wherever else is a common place for call centres if it’s no longer there

I don't know if there are call centers full of phone sex workers. You'd have the same background noise you get when calling any call center. And the workers would have to get paid when nothing was happening.

Here's a read on the topic:

https://www.businessinsider.com/reality-of-being-a-phone-sex...

>> 2. Is anyone currently doing this with chat bots and speech synthesisers?

Me: Hey Google, talk dirty to me.

Google: Manure. Dust. Crusty crumbs on the floor. <Poop emoji>

I can only report that Google does not talk dirty to me at this time.

In the 80's I once met a guy who claimed to own the phone number on the "HOW'S MY DRIVING? CALL 1 (800) EAT-SHIT" bumper stickers, a parody of all those trucker's bumper stickers with real 800 numbers to report them to their masters.

Not sure how he monetized it, but he had some scheme going on, and paid for it by selling the bumper stickers. Probably he sold more to all the careless drivers who called and wanted one too, than actual shit eaters.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HOWS-MY-DRIVING-CALL-1-800-EAT-SHIT...

Do you remember the vending machines around that time on MIT campus that had games built in: some LEDs that would blink after you purchased a coke, and if you won, you got a free coke!

I think there also were some musical coke machines, too.

(I was also visiting while in high school!)

When I worked at the CMU CS department, my office was right down the hall from the Internet Coke Machine, and you could "finger coke@cmua" to see how many sodas of what kind there were, and what their temperature was.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/little-known-story-firs...

https://www.livinginternet.com/i/ia_myths_coke.htm

I used to spend hours on the hotline as a kid. It was really weird and entertaining.

I upvote this because I’m impressed by the number icons.

“Enclosed Unicode Numerals”

Very common in Japan.

Japanese language require IME to type, which converts sound written in hiragana to kanji: i.e. you type soba → get “そば” → IME suggests you “蕎麦”. Basically a stretch of modern phone keyboard correction but existed since the 80s.

Nice side effect to it is while there are predetermined sets of conversions coming with IME, it also handles some arbitrary mapping for convenience, i.e. かお(face) → ( ´∀｀) or きょう(today) → 2020/04/08.

iOS Japanese keyboard gives me following for literally number 1: 1 １ ① 一 ⅰ Ⅰ 1K ⒈ ⑴

Searching for that string explicitly [on Google] only yielded HN results, but relaxing the search terms yielded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosed_Alphanumerics

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