Florida's SunPass Toll Free Number Is NOT 1-800-SUNPASS
Sometimes you need to call a company or government service and you guess at the toll free number. "SunPass" seems like a gimme—it's got the right number of letters, it's two words, and they're even broken into groups of 3 and 4 just like a phone number. It's a no brainer! But it's also a sex line number, which a reader's friend realized last week when she tried to get some information about Florida DOT's prepaid toll program. The real number for SunPass is 1-888-TOLL-FLA.
This reminds us of Gizmodo's post last week about the good time Linksys support number printed on their router packaging, which originally connected buyers to a sex chat line. (It has since been corrected.) 1-800-SUN-PASS isn't a mistake, though—either Florida just doesn't want to buy it, or the phone sex company doesn't want to sell it. (The number, we mean.)
(Thanks to Chris!)
(Photo: Getty)
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you have to admit, though, the image is hilarious.
So when you want to get information on something, you just start guessing what you think the phone number is? Brilliant! And, great research by the poster of this story, you didn't even put the correct number down. According to SunPass's website, which I found by typing "sun pass" into Yahoo is 1-888-TOLL-FLA
@chrisgoh: I agree, chrisgoh, this is really asinine. Anyone who tries to call a business just by guessing the telephone number deserves to get connected to a hot girl whispering lustily about the lingerie slipping down her back, her eager bosom, her hot, wet... oh, um ... wait a minute, never mind.
I used to work for a consumer goods company that owned hundreds of 800 numbers. After 1 misprint, a guy had to call all the 800/866 equivalents of the numbers they owned. A large number were porn lines.
Wonder what mnemonic the sex co is advertising...
SUN-PASS = 786-7277 =
pump-ass = pun-raps
rum-saps = rump-ass
run-pass = runs-ass
stop-asp = stop-ass
sum-raps = sum-saps
Thanks to phonespellDOTorg
Oooh...a "filler article!"
criminy, you guys are pretty hostile tonight. I honestly thought it was a funny post and of interest to Consumerist readers. I'm pulling the article.
Aww, don't pull the article Chris. These guys are just being jerks. Maybe they had a long day? I had a really long day with a 12 hour shift, and at least this made me chuckle a little bit. I say you should keep it!
@Chris Walters: Okay, I won't pull the article. I'm being dramatic. But everyone who doesn't feel this is newsworthy should know that AT&T announced they're going to stop selling DirecTV in the first quarter of 2008. No word yet on whether or not their other satellite partner, EchoStar, will become the sole partner for AT&T. There. There's your legitimate news.
I've noticed an alarming decrease in sense of humor around here lately.
I like the post, it gave me a laugh. It's also a great help to those of us looking for prepaid toll-card information or phone sex in Florida. Or both.
@Chris Walters: "You could also just write, "Hey, I found an error, it's 888 not 800.""
And you could have just said, thanks for catching my error, I've corrected the post.
I wasn't saying the story shouldn't have been posted. I was saying that the "readers friend" referenced in the article was kind of stupid for randomly guessing at the number rather than looking it up. And if you are going to post something to the front page of a major blog, you should at least perform some basic fact checking when writing the article. If the post had linked to another blog which had the misinformation, I'd be more forgiving but it appears to be original content.
And overall, not a big deal, if anything I found it more funny that an article written about someone dialing a wrong number contained a wrong number.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was "Gawker Posting Quotas" but I didn't go bitch about it. Its not my blog. If you want to bitch about the content, I'm sure Ben will be happy to refund your membership fees and you can be on your way.
Wait... people still use phone-sex lines?
@Chris Walters:
Ah some people are just cranky. I've often had stuff to submit, but really sat on the fence wondering if it fully qualified to be on Consumerist. Sometimes it's a tough call. In my opinion this post did. You just can't please everybody.
A phrase to get you through the day: "F*** 'em"
A .14 second google of 'Sun Pass' yielded 10,500,000 results of which the first one was the official Sun Pass site and the phone number was in plain view even on the google search results page.
Trying to guess an 800 number is just stupid and a story relating to it is below you and the Consumerist.
Chris don't listen to these guys. They're just pissed because they are losing their jobs at CompUSA.
Anyway, to all, I'm the one who sent this in to Chris because it was something funny. A friend of mine was out, on the road, and had a problem with her sun Pass. Without internet access, she guessed at the number (which appears to be blasphemy here) and got the other line. She was simply trying to use the same logic that companies use when generating their toll free number, like 1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-CONTACTS, 1-800-MATTRESS, 1-800-GOOG411, etc.
@D.B. Cooper-Nichol: I'd vote for 1-888-SUM-SAPS. I think it sums up the people that call phone sex lines (with a "twist" on the word "some" of course)...
@D.B. Cooper-Nichol: My money's on RUMP-ASS, personally.
And thank you, you just saved me a ton of time staring at my phone trying to guess it out (the -ASS was pretty much a given, imo).
@arkitect75: Frankly that makes your friend sound even more foolish. I live in Florida and in the past had a SunPass. At least at that time, the phone number was printed on a sticker on the bottom of the SunPass.
@chrisgoh: Well, you obviously have never heard that sometimes those things you call "stickers" will come off, especially since the sun beats down on us here almost everyday.
1-888-SUMP-ASS?
@arkitect75: My 34+ years of Florida experience with stickers finds the opposite. Usually they get baked on rather than coming off.
@chrisgoh: You realize that we are bickering over the longevity of a sticker. I simply answered you with that since you called my friend foolish. There was no sticker on her sunpass; it was an old one. On newer sunpasses, they actually stamp the info on.
@arkitect75: You are the one who started on the longevity of the sticker thing. Even if the sticker was gone and she needed to call and it was reasonable to start guessing numbers, it is still not reasonable to make an issue that one of the numbers happened to be a sex line.
As an analogy, if I needed to call The Consumerist and started dialing numbers that I thought were theirs, is it an issue for The Consumerist that the number I happened to come up with was a sex line?
To summarize my whole point from the original post - It is not SunPasses problem that the number your friends randomly dialed happened to be a sex line. Second, the poster of the article did not do the most basic of fact checking to get the correct number correct. And, I only pointed out the second point because it was FUNNY in light of the subject of the post. Funny like when a poster points out a grammar error only to make a grammar error.
@Chris Walters: Chris...remember the old saying "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all?" Well, that was before the Internet. Please don't mistake casual snarkism for an actual comments with useful content and whatever you do, don't take anything said on an Internet blog personally.
Cheer up :0)
We seem to be getting into a morass of bitchery here, and straying far from what was the main point of the original post.
Namely, what are the rates and how hot did the girls sound at 1-800-PUMP-ASS?
wow, this has to be one of the stupidest things i've ever seen on the consumerist.