What?!  I didn’t even know I could make calls from a key pad box on a gated drive.

Here’s what happened.  Every Friday morning I meet some guys from my school for a bible study.  And the house that we meet at is in a gated community off of 552.  The other morning when I arrived the gate was closed and I couldn’t remember the code to open it.

“Its has four 4’s and a symbol [either * or #]” I thought as I started punching different combinations of 4’s, #’s, and *’s.  After about the 3^rd combination I entered into the keypad the box started ringing; ringing like a phone.  Hoping that I could enter the correct code before someone picked up on the other end [wherever the other end was] I kept punching buttons.  A voice came out of the little speaker next to the buttons and said in a monotonic tone, “Please enter a long distance extension…”  The voice said something else but I was too baffled and flustered to stick around, so I through the truck into reverse and backed onto the street where I waited for a bit.  

My first thought would be that I’d just wait for someone else to enter and follow them in, but in all the times I had been there I had never seen any one else enter or leave by these gates, so I reverted to plan B.  I “txt” my friend who was also coming to the Bible study and asked him.  He sent me the correct code, I rolled forward and entered it.  The gate opened like it should and all was fine, but now I was curious how I had dialed the gate.

Andrew Nemeth