I wrote a blog post about telephone central office codes almost two years ago and mentioned how 911 and the numbers around it (912, 914, 915) are not used in case people misdial.

Now 911 operators in Smiths Falls are dealing with people misdialing 913 as 911. These phone numbers look like (613) 913-yyyy and were allocated to TELUS Mobility.

How is this interesting to technophiles and people who study usability? The telephone system connects to a number as soon as it is recognized. As soon as 9-1-1 is dialed on a phone it's put through. Consider how easy it is to push 1 twice by accident and you can see the problem with using 913 (or any 91x). I missed this point in my previous blog post: I thought 3 was far enough away from the 1 to prevent misdials.

This may seem trivial at first but consider how the 911 system works, especially in rural areas. There are only a few operators to take emergency 911 calls. If these people are constantly dealing with misdials they could be too busy to respond to actual emergencies.

It seems like a trivial thing at first -- but when real lives are at stake trivial technical problems can lead to big consequences. Being more familiar with technology and usability, engineers have a duty to alert managers above us about possible problems like these.

Clearly the 913 CO code should not be used at all.