It happened during the kicker on the newscast Tuesday, when reporter Rahema Ellis went to Maine to do a light kicker story on families who were introducing their children to rotary and push button phones to make calls, because they're too young to have a cell phone.

In the story, a kid complains she can only call her grandmother, before the movement in this small town grows and other parents start adopting the idea. Soon, the little girl is able to call most of her friends. 

To be honest, it wasn't much of a story, but at least it wasn't harmful. 

Until the end, when it was potentially disastrous. The camera zooms in on a shot of the push button ringing landline, as the girl runs merrily towards it to talk to one of her friends. And that's when someone screwed up, failing to blur the phone number listed on the device. 

As some here will remember, there was a slot on those old models at the bottom of the dial where people would manually write in their phone numbers. That line was clearly visible in one of the final shots. (I've whited it out on the pic below, but it was plainly available on the HD broadcast.)



People being the usual idiots and perverts they are, I can only wonder if that poor family is now going to get inundated with calls from creeps across the country, who were able to capture those dialable digits and harass them. Hopefully NBC fixes this before it goes online or it airs on the west coast. But the damage may already have been done.