I decided
to take the matter to the newspaper.
I made an appointment for 10am Monday morning to meet with Peter Van Vanhove, one of the Netherland's foremost investigative reporters. His work in 1997 and 1998 had uncovered the sale of toddlers for sexual purposes, and led to the Netherlands finally making child pornography illegal in 1999 (nonetheless, it is still "tolerated" in the Netherlands like just about everything else that is officially illegal).
Yes, the Netherlands was practically the last nation to make child pornography illegal, and that, less than a year ago at the time of this writing. It happened just months after they made prostitution legal. All this time, everyone had thought prostitution was legal in the Netherlands but it was really just another case of police and officials "looking the other way," -- the policy of "tolerance" gone wild.
I watched as Peter Van Vanhove dialed the phone number. He handed me the telphone. It was a busy signal.
I said, "just my luck, after six months they must have turned on their phones today." We waited and waited and got nothing but a busy signal.
Tiring of waiting, I went home and tried the number again just to make sure. It still gave the signal of an disconnected number!
I called the telephone company. They informed me that the number had never, ever, been connected. I asked, "How can you be sure that the number has never been connected?" to which they replied, "Because it is a reserved number that can only be assigned to an internal phone of a Telephone Centrale" (automated switchboard).
I asked them about the busy signal that I had received at the Haalems Dagblad newspaper and was informed that this was normal behavior. Callers from within a building that already had its own Telephone Centrale (a device required in the Netherlands for those with more than one telephone) would receive a busy signal for that number because it was categorized as an "internal-usage-only" number, however one that didn't exist on the particular Centrale system being used (the Haarlems Dagblad newspaper in this case).
"But," they assured me, "that specific number can never, ever be reached from an outside line. Only callers from the same Telephone Centrale could ever reach that number." It's not like America where you can often subsititute a person's extension for the last 3 or 4 digits of a company phone number and then get directly to the person. It simply doesn't work that way in the Netherlands.
I made an appointment for 10am Monday morning to meet with Peter Van Vanhove, one of the Netherland's foremost investigative reporters. His work in 1997 and 1998 had uncovered the sale of toddlers for sexual purposes, and led to the Netherlands finally making child pornography illegal in 1999 (nonetheless, it is still "tolerated" in the Netherlands like just about everything else that is officially illegal).
Yes, the Netherlands was practically the last nation to make child pornography illegal, and that, less than a year ago at the time of this writing. It happened just months after they made prostitution legal. All this time, everyone had thought prostitution was legal in the Netherlands but it was really just another case of police and officials "looking the other way," -- the policy of "tolerance" gone wild.
I watched as Peter Van Vanhove dialed the phone number. He handed me the telphone. It was a busy signal.
I said, "just my luck, after six months they must have turned on their phones today." We waited and waited and got nothing but a busy signal.
Tiring of waiting, I went home and tried the number again just to make sure. It still gave the signal of an disconnected number!
I called the telephone company. They informed me that the number had never, ever, been connected. I asked, "How can you be sure that the number has never been connected?" to which they replied, "Because it is a reserved number that can only be assigned to an internal phone of a Telephone Centrale" (automated switchboard).
I asked them about the busy signal that I had received at the Haalems Dagblad newspaper and was informed that this was normal behavior. Callers from within a building that already had its own Telephone Centrale (a device required in the Netherlands for those with more than one telephone) would receive a busy signal for that number because it was categorized as an "internal-usage-only" number, however one that didn't exist on the particular Centrale system being used (the Haarlems Dagblad newspaper in this case).
"But," they assured me, "that specific number can never, ever be reached from an outside line. Only callers from the same Telephone Centrale could ever reach that number." It's not like America where you can often subsititute a person's extension for the last 3 or 4 digits of a company phone number and then get directly to the person. It simply doesn't work that way in the Netherlands.
