Lo and Leduc - 079 recalculated: Who picks up the phone when you dial that fateful number? // Update 14.06.2018 / 12:15 pm

Dominik Bärlocher

4.6.2018

Translation: machine translated

Support: Livia Gamper, Céline Meury

Pictures: Thomas Kunz, Dominik Bärlocher

In the summer hit "079", Lo and Leduc tell the story of a man in love who searches for the number of his beloved by mobile. I followed this up and tried to save the man from his tragic fate with maths. Also: I call the number he dialled in the tram accident.

Lo and Leduc have done it. Their song "079" is the biggest Swiss hit in Swiss music history. The story in the song is banal, but does something interesting: it combines classic telephone research with the confusion and pitfalls of the digital age.

The more or less romantic, more or less funny story tells of an unhappy man in love who is desperately looking for his beloved. Or rather: her mobile number. In the end, just as he has made it, fate throws a spanner in the works.

Let's see if I can make the man in love miss his tram. And survives. I'm using open source intelligence for this article. This means that all the information I use in the article is public. With the exception of the phone number that I dial at the end to find out who is really on the phone at the time the lover in the song steps in front of the tram.

The story in the song

The summer song dominated by autotune tells the story of a man in love who desperately wants the mobile number of his beloved. But she refuses to give him the number. But because the lover is now so in love, he doesn't give up and becomes a stalker. He calls the information centre and lo and behold, his beloved is working there.

But our heroic stalker begs her: Please give me the area code
.
The beloved gives in: 079.

So the lover gets to work and calls through all the numbers. According to the song, there are ten million combinations. In the end, he finds her number and is so stunned by her voice that he doesn't notice an approaching tram and gets run over.

With this information, the mission statement is clear: the man in love has to save time somewhere so that he is at the same place, plus or minus 30 seconds, where he is run over in the timing of the song. The aim is for him to miss his tram. So if he is on the tracks 30 seconds before the time of the accident, he is safe. The same applies to 30 seconds later.

What the person in love does

Luckily, the man in love in the song gives us a time frame. This allows us to work out how long something will take him.

The man in love also states in the song that he reckons with ten million numbers, i.e. from 079 000 00 00 to 079 999 99 99. A call takes 20 seconds until he finds out that he has the wrong number.

This is the first time you notice a mistake that ruins the whole song in its current form. In other words: the lover misses the tram. Hooray. Because if he needs 20 seconds per call, then it actually takes 200 million seconds to try through all the numbers. However, this does not correspond to the six and a half years in the song, but only six years and four months, i.e. 6.3 years. This means that the man in love would be run over by a tram a good two months before he said he would be.

The sleepless man on the phone

In addition, the man in love doesn't sleep. The 6.3 years is a number that comes out if you don't take breaks when you dial the 10 million numbers. No sleep, no work, no toilet break. Who wants to have their loved one on the phone when you're on the throne? Plus, it never runs out of battery and is not disturbed by anything else.

But assuming he actually needs the 6.5 years, then there's two months for toilet, sleep and stuff. If you sleep eight hours a night for six and a half years, you'll sleep 18,982 hours. At six hours a night, that's 14,236 hours.

In reality, the whole exercise, including six hours of sleep, would take eight years rounded up. The lover misses his tram.

Things get even worse if the person in love works a 42.5-hour week. Then the whole operation takes 10.27 years, i.e. 10 years, 3 months, 4 days, 10 hours, 51 minutes and 59 seconds. That's assuming he doesn't work overtime and spends every second of free time on his stalking project.

Let's pick up a mobile

Let's try this with the phone. While I play the lover, editor Livia Gamper pretends to be the owner of every phone number. I call Livia and she picks up after the third beep
.

• I say "Sorry, I've dialled the wrong number" to a man. We say goodbye. That takes 19.22 seconds
• I ask a woman if she is the woman from the information centre. She says no. I apologise and hang up. That takes 21.69 seconds

Did Lo and Leduc try this out during the songwriting process?

"No, we haven't tested it," says Lo and Leduc. Nevertheless, the figure of 20 seconds per call is quite good. On average, a call takes 20.44 seconds.

To find out exactly how long we spend on the phone with these times, let's throw some demographics into the mix. All figures were collected in 2016.

• There are 8,419,550 people living in Switzerland
• Of which 4,173,437 are male
• Of which 4 246 113 are female

If the person in love calls every person in Switzerland, it looks like this:

• He calls men for 2 years, 6 months, 1 week, 6 days, 21 hours, 43 minutes and 59 seconds
• He talks to women on the phone for 2 years, 11 months, 9 hours, 45 minutes and 19 seconds
• In total, he spends 5 years, 5 months and 2 weeks and a few crushes on the phone

This brings a new realisation: he can't even try 10 million numbers, because there aren't that many people in Switzerland.

079 analysed

But since the demographic data doesn't reveal much more, I turn the tables. Instead of inferring from the person to the phone number, I infer from the number to the person. Therefore, off to the phone book. Since the person in love is looking for a private number, he can eliminate 85 863, because they are registered to businesses. 180,098 are registered to private individuals, of which 3623 are in Bern, where the story took place according to the dialect. However, as the person in love cannot filter further by gender, let's leave that alone.

The area code 079 is historically the Swisscom area code. But for some years now, you can also use 079 to register your number with other suppliers. This doesn't make things easy. An initial enquiry with Swisscom reveals the following

Good, then to the Federal Office of Communications OFCOM.

This eliminates the need to research other suppliers, as Francis Meier gives me a link to a register in which the allocated number blocks are listed. In the parameter search, I look for number blocks between 079000 and 079999.

I find that only 843 blocks between 079 000 00 00 and 079 999 99 99 are assigned. This means that our lover doesn't have to call 10 million numbers, but only 8.43 million, i.e. around a fifth less.

Sabrina Hubacher, media spokeswoman for Swisscom, explains the reasons why blocks of numbers are not allocated: "Certain numbers, for example those beginning with 079 117 or 079 112, are not allocated by OFCOM. They can be confused with the numbers of emergency services."

The bill with real numbers

With a little research, our lover could have saved himself some time. And that's exactly what saved his life. So let's do the maths again. With demographics, 8.43 million numbers and all the trimmings.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 50.4 per cent of the Swiss population is female. We map that to the 8.43 million numbers
.

• 4,248,720 numbers belong to women. Our lover calls women for a total of 92 069 762.4 seconds
• 4 181 280 numbers belong to men. Our lover calls men for a total of 80,364,201.6 seconds
• This results in a phone time of 172,433,964 seconds

If we take the example from the song without sleep, work and life, then the lover in the song is on the phone for 205,006,464 seconds. With Swisscom's elimination method, however, only 172,433,964 seconds. In other words, he is 1 year, 11 days, 23 hours, 54 minutes and 59 seconds ahead of his fatal tram.

Happy end!

With employees and sleep, things look different. Because then he is 118,851,608 seconds - or 3 years, 9 months, 5 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes and 7 seconds - late.

Happy end again!

One last calculation: What is the number of the person you love really?

If the lover in the song sleeplessly tries out all the numbers, he will have reached his destination after six and a half years. That would mean that her number is 079 999 99 99.

But what if the man sleeps and works? With a 42.5-hour week, he works an average of 6.07 hours per day if we map the time over seven days. His entire project would take 303 101 167.5 seconds if he phoned through all the numbers. But in the song he claims to have reached his destination in 205 006 464 seconds. However, 103 101 167.52 seconds of this is sleep and work. So he spends a total of 101,905,296.48 seconds on the phone until the tram catches him.

• Of this time, he spent 49.6 per cent on the phone with men, i.e. 50545027.05 seconds
• Of these, 50.4 per cent were with women, i.e. 51360269.43 seconds

From this we can deduce:

• He has spoken to 2,629,814,103, or 2,629,815, men on the phone
• He has phoned 2,370,109,341, i.e. 2,370,110, women
• That makes a total of 4999925 phone calls

If he had started at 079 000 00 00, he would have ended up at 079 499 99 25. But, many of the number blocks, especially at the beginning of the range, are not taken.

So we are looking for the 499th number block ending in 9925, which results in the number 079 638 99 25.

Who picks up there?

So I dial the number. A man picks up.

"I think you've dialled the wrong number," he says with confusion in his voice

"No, I'm right, but I just don't know who I'm calling," I reply.

The man on the other end is probably not the beloved of the lover in the song. He is a Belgian called Philippe Buschen. He lives in the canton of Zug and runs a food truck. Phill's BBQ serves, among other things, spare ribs, beef brisket and pulled pork as it is served in the American South.

What have we learnt from all this? Nothing really. Except perhaps that the man in love didn't fall in love with a woman from the information centre, but with Southern barbecue. That's okay too.

So, that's it. And speaking of which: if the person in love starts calling at 5 p.m. today, they'll be under the wheels at 6:14 p.m. and 24 seconds on Sunday, 1 December 2024.

Update: Media review

The story has made waves. I wouldn't have thought it now.

• Helene Obrist, a reporter at watson was the first to pick up the story.
• It's followed radio SRF 3. Unfortunately, I don't have an audio snippet, but voices from Bern report that the report was broadcast at around 4.30 pm on 6 June
• On 20 Min, the author is referred to as a nerd with the abbreviation kaf. Huere cheeky, yo!
• On Radio24, I'll be talking to presenter Maximilian Baumann about food trucks and OFCOM from Thursday, 7 June 2018 at 16:00.
• Krisztina Scherrer from the eastern Swiss online portal FM1Today asked me if I had anything better to do. No, I don't.
• The St. Galler Tagblatt, my teaching company, picked up the story from page 33 in the 11 June 2018 edition. A greeting to Roman Hertler and to Fürstenlandstrasse.
• The St. Galler Tagblatt once again: In the 14 June edition, I am honoured with a Brodworscht. The Tagblatt awards the prize for special achievements that are somehow unusual, strange or just plain weird. If you want to see me with about 45 kilos more on my ribs before my weightlifting career, buy today's Tagblatt with my picture from around 2011.

And that's not all. I'll gradually add to the story here as it emerges. <p

Dominik Bärlocher

Senior Editor

dominik.baerlocher@digitecgalaxus.ch

Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.

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