It was easier in those days to find NOC phone numbers and network engineers generally like to fix problems.

I did network event correlation in those days (using prolog and Perl to convert hundreds of thousands of log entries and events to actionable alerts), and would call various NOCs all of the time, usually to let them know that their device was spewing alerts or doing something dumb. There was very little in the way of authentication. Once you crossed the line to ask for things vs fix things you’d get more questions.