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"Dancing with the Stars" Hang-Up
The way Kathy Klein figures it, John O'Hurley's smooth moves have cost her about $500.
Klein owns a telephone answering service in Mount Pleasant, Michigan (population: 25,946), with a toll-free phone number strikingly similar to the toll-free phone number that viewers of the ABC summer hit Dancing with the Stars are asked to call in order to place votes for the quickstepping O'Hurley.
Wednesday nights are the worst, because Wednesday nights are when the show airs. The calls come in, Klein says, "at the top of every hour, starting at 10, 11, 12 midnight..."
"They say, 'I wanna vote.' "
Hundreds of calls from O'Hurley fans--maybe as many as 500, she says--have been logged by Klein's Mount Pleasant Answering Service since June 1, when the show premiered.
While the calls are free to the person dialing, they cost Klein money. She's absorbing the long-distance cost of handling wayward rings meant for O'Hurley, but coming in on a line assigned to Samson Resources, an oil-field company.
If any business other than Samson had the Dancing with the Stars-esque line, Klein says, she simply would have assigned a new number. But Samson has an alarm system linked to its toll-free line, she explains. Changing the phone number would mean reprogramming the alarm system, and Klein says she doesn't want to force her client into taking on that expense.
So, Klein and her staff is stuck--answering phones, not recording votes for O'Hurley, waiting for the show to end.
Klein's plight was first reported last week in her local newspaper, the Morning Sun. Since then, the story has been picked up, and told and retold. But the story doesn't yet have a happy, or even satisfying, ending.
"No help at all," Klein says of her dealings with ABC. "The lady was really rude...[The network rep] said, 'Oh, our viewers are misdialing. Oh, well.'"
The Morning Sun story quoted a Mount Pleasant Answering Service operator as saying she saw the Samson phone number, with its 888 prefix, on Dancing with the Stars. In the article, ABC denied it has broadcast anything but the correct number, with the correct 866 prefix. The network did not return a call for comment on Tuesday.
TV phone-number mix-ups are not unprecedented. Last March, Fox ordered an American Idol do-over when it aired incorrect numbers for several contestants.
But caller mix-ups aren't unprecedented, either. "Is it possible? Misdials are possible on any number," says Verizon spokesman Kevin Laverty.
However callers are ending up in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Klein figures all she's asking from ABC, "a multimillion dollar company," is a little help. "$500 would cover it," she says.
It might help, too, if O'Hurley were eliminated from the competition. But with the Seinfeld alum's fleet feet and partner Charlotte Jorgensen's grace that might not happen for another three weeks, when the series' winner is crowned.
"I wasn't actually interested in the show," says Klein, who has yet to catch the British import. "But [this] really left a bad taste."
Perhaps not unlike Evander Holyfield trying to do the jive.
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