This story showed up on the Yahoo! home page as "African cell phone users invent beeping trick." Apparently calling someone and hanging up right away so they see your number on their phone and call you back is such a wide-spread money-saving technique in Africa, cell phone carriers are having a hard time managing their networks because of the flood of charge-free, half-second calls.
I take issue with the thought that this was a recent African invention, though. Way back in the day of land lines, when my grandmother had a limited call plan (she could only make X number of calls per month), she would call my parents and let the phone ring once, then hang up; my parents would call her back so they could talk and she didn't get charged for making a call. I use Hubby's cell phone as a beeper sometimes - I know he's teaching or on the road so I don't want to distract him, but want him to call me back when he gets a chance, so I let his phone ring once and I hang up. (Yeah, I cuold text him, but Hubby doesn't do text and doesn't want to bother learning.) So I don't think Africans "invented" this using cells as beepers technique, but they're using it most widely.
There's lots of other phone tricks people use/have used. Before widespread caller ID and answering machines, friends who were avoiding calls from certain people would tell their friends to let the phone ring twice, hang up, and call back again (like a secret knock system). I have caller ID now (came free with my VoIP), but half the time the display shows "Private Number," so I still let the caller talk into the answering machine while I listen and decide if I want to pick up or not.
What other "off label" ways are people using telephone technology to save money/time/privacy/etc.?
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