My guess is that the script ran repeatedly, even after a good connection was established. Telecom companies only billed whole minutes, so a call of 13:01 would be billed as 14 minutes. Or to put it simply, if her script made multiple calls every second, the library would get billed for multiple minutes per minute. If I made fifteen 1-second calls in a minute, I would get billed for 15 minutes of calls in that single minute.
Also, phone companies would typically bill a large flat fee for each long distance call. So making a ton of short calls was more expensive than a single long call. If her script was configured to reestablish the connection in between each upload (instead of simply starting it the once, then uploading multiple times), then the library would get billed a lot of those flat fees for each individual call.
I also found out the hard way that cell phone providers’ “free minutes” plans (back before virtually every phone plan had unlimited minutes) didn’t kick in if the call was started before the time. If your minutes were free after 8PM and you started a three hour call at 7:59, the entire call would be billed, instead of only the first minute.
My guess is that the script ran repeatedly, even after a good connection was established. Telecom companies only billed whole minutes, so a call of 13:01 would be billed as 14 minutes. Or to put it simply, if her script made multiple calls every second, the library would get billed for multiple minutes per minute. If I made fifteen 1-second calls in a minute, I would get billed for 15 minutes of calls in that single minute.
Also, phone companies would typically bill a large flat fee for each long distance call. So making a ton of short calls was more expensive than a single long call. If her script was configured to reestablish the connection in between each upload (instead of simply starting it the once, then uploading multiple times), then the library would get billed a lot of those flat fees for each individual call.
I also found out the hard way that cell phone providers’ “free minutes” plans (back before virtually every phone plan had unlimited minutes) didn’t kick in if the call was started before the time. If your minutes were free after 8PM and you started a three hour call at 7:59, the entire call would be billed, instead of only the first minute.