Date: Fri, 7 Feb 92 17:15:30 -0800
From: pjs@euclid.JPL.NASA.GOV (Peter J. Scott)
Subject: What next - pizza over UUCP?                    [UUCPizza?]

A colleague just gave me this juicy tidbit.  Seems that his brother-in-law was
with the 82nd Airborne and, upon assignment to Fort Bragg, was given an office
that had never been used.  He plugged a phone into the jack and the phone
immediately rang.  No, it wasn't telemarketers; he was greeted with a modem
tone instead.  Hung up.  Phone immediately rang again.  This repeated 24 hours
a day until the Army put a trace on the call.  The trace led to, get this, a
Coca-Cola machine.  The manufacturer had built into these vending machines the
capability to call the bottling company when they were getting low on supplies
and order more.

Unfortunately for my friend's brother-in-law, the bottling company that owned
this machine in particular wasn't interested in this option, so they didn't
change the default telephone number that was programmed into the machine, and
which was happened to be set to, you guessed it, the office at Fort Bragg.

The Army cut the telephone cable on the Coke machine.  (I guess they weren't
armed at the time.)  This brand of vending machine also has the capability of
signalling via modem that it was out of change, full up on money, or had been
broken into ("Help, I've fallen over and I can't get up...").   
                                              [Not high enough on Coke?  PGN]

I suppose modern machines just use FDDI.  Maybe PGN could add a few candy
machines to the RISKS distribution?