This requires some back story.
Many years ago, probably 15-20 years, we had a standard cord landline phone like most people. When you hang one of them up, you usually put it back on its pedestal which had a receiver that the phone presses and turns off. You don’t push a button to turn it off like with most phones today. When you depress the receiver like that though, it makes a brief static sound as the phone turns from on to off. One of the things I tried to do was hold the receiver so that the phone was half off and half in use and prolong that static sound. Its sort of like pushing down one side of a scale with your finger so that the other side balances.
Doing that had led to interesting things. I learned that if I do that enough, sometimes the phone would start dialing another number. One time I got an answering machine of some lady, I left some stupid message on her machine I think.
But more than once, what I would get is this call to a weird “test”. When it picked up, an obviously mechanical voice stated
“Proctern test set. Please select test. Line test press 2, something something test press 3, etc…”
I later found out through other phone meddlings that I could reach this automated test by pressing “111”. So I went through their whole menu (as a kid, this was like discovering hidden treasure). Most of the “tests” did nothing, I can barely remember them. But one test stood out and I used it repeatedly, the “sound test”. By going to the sound test, I could choose to have the phone give off this high-pitched squeal noise. It sounds like the noise from the Emergency Broadcast System. There were other sounds too, but that’s the one I remember the most
Does anyone have any idea what the hell I stumbled into? Does anyone work at a phone company that can tell me what this was? As far as I knew, it did nothing permanent. Listen to some weird sounds or go through other menu options, that’s about it. I couldn’t, for example, cancel our phone or mess with our payment.
Eventually with the phasing out of those old style phones and their replacement with new cordless landlines, I no longer had a receiver I could half-press. I’ve tried 111 since but it doesn’t lead me anywhere. If it matters, our phone company was whatever company preceded Time Warner, as that’s who we pay now. Maybe AT&T, maybe the defunct Pacific Bell.