I took a field recorder and suction cup microphone out today to document something strange involving 1-800-WEATHER, the toll-free number that used to connect to a local weather forecast based on your area code. At least it tried to do that. It did not recognize some of the newer area codes, like (929). Calls to 1-800-WEATHER made from payphones that showed Caller ID from the (929) area code returned a weather snapshot for Washington, D.C. And since most payphones in New York now show Long Island (516) area code phone numbers the weather conditions were often off base.

It had glitches but 1-800-WEATHER was a fun little call to make, for free, if you happened to find a working payphone. It also connected to a free (ad supported) 411 lookup service. The service still exists but toll-free access does not, so calls are no longer free from payphones.

As of about a year ago the number no longer connects to a weather announcement. Instead it goes to Uncle Ike’s Pot Shop in Seattle, though they do not advertise it as their number nor can I find any published connection between 1-800-WEATHER and Uncle Ike’s.

Why would a pot shop pick up a phone number like 1-800-WEATHER? Possible letter combinations for the number, 932-8437, do not seem to spell anything meaningful besides “weather”, unless a pot reference I don’t get lurks in some of these combinations at phonespell.org. YEAVIES? WEAVIES? How about 9-EAT-HER?

The real mystery isn’t so much why Uncle Ike’s acquired the number. Any type of easy-to-remember toll-free number has value, and if Ike’s is not publicizing it as theirs then maybe they intend to try and resell it. Their publicized toll-free number is 1-800-GET-DRUGS. Leave off the last S for… oh, I don’t know, some pot culture punch line must be out there.

The mystery (to me, at least) is what ghost in the machine routes the number to something different when calling it from a landline payphone. Instead of connecting to Uncle Ike’s, as happens with calls made from cellular payphones, 1-800-WEATHER from a landline payphone instead goes to a pre-recorded announcement saying that the number had been seized by the Internal Revenue Service for having been involved in some kind of fraud. Listen in to what I captured with the field recorder today at one of Astoria’s landline payphones:

This is a message from the Internal Revenue Service. The telephone or fax number you have just called has been disconnected because it may be involved in a scam. You might have gotten this phone number directly via fax, or from an e-mail, text, or voicemail message claiming to come from the IRS. But no matter how real it seemed that message was a trick. It’s called “phishing”, because scammers go fishing for information about you or your financial accounts. Once scammers have that they can use it to commit identity theft, or fraud. If you’re concerned about your account, contact your financial institution with the information from your statement, and find out how to protect yourself against phishing and identity theft at onguardonline.gov, a website managed by the Federal Trade Commission. That’s onguardonline.gov. This message will be repeated once.

The message does not repeat, contrary to the closing statement.

I don’t know if my old suction cup recording thing is just not very good but I had to amplify the hell out of this recording to make it audible.

Before discovering that calls to 1-800-WEATHER went different places depending what type of payphone I called from I actually thought Uncle Ike’s business had been seized by the IRS. Nothing to that effect seems to be true.

A simple explanation for this bit of weirdness, which I first noticed over a year ago, must exist.

UPDATE: July 18 2020. Calls to 1-800-WEATHER from VOIP or cellular connections no longer go to Ike’s pot shop. Instead you hear this prerecorded message announcing that the person at extension 1004 has a full mailbox, and can not receive messages. Calls from landline phones still go to the IRS announcement. Here’s the full voicemail message:

It’s not a great picture but here is what my field recorder rig looked like in the blood-spattered payphone enclosure from which I made this recording up on Ditmars Boulevard. Just kidding, it’s paint.