The Woes of Having a Small-time Rural Phone Company (May, 1984) --------------------------------------------------------------- This story is for those of you who hate Ma Bell. In many parts of the country, Bell is not the company that provides you with telephone service. There are lots of tiny telephone companies out there and some of them make Bell (and her children) look pretty terrific. The following is from one of our readers who has to put up with a rural telephone company. I had a problem with my telephone company. I picked up my line, and there was a dial tone there. I began to make a long-distance call. After the tenth digit went through, I heard: "do weee doo...We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number before dialing again or call your business office for assistance." So I switched to my good phone, which makes clean crisp tones and dialed the same number again. I got the same message again! I said, "What the hell?!" (It was an 800 number, of course.) So I switched over and dialed a regular "1 plus" number I started dialing the number direct: the same recording came on! So I dialed my local business office, which is the repair service. It was a local seven-digit number. Again, all I got was: "do weee doo..." Then I dialed the operator, waited a second or two, and the recording came back on. I had an idea. "I know what they ve done; they've made a mistake in the central office and changed my touch-tone rating to rotary!" Doing that would certainly produce the effect I was getting. If you tried to break the dial tone, you couldn't call anything because it's not programmed in. They must have made an error somewhere. I picked up my rotary dial phone and dialed the local repair service again. But it did the exact same thing on the rotary phone! So I tried calling a local number (local to my exchange) and got the recording. I dialed my own number! "Your call cannot be completed as dialed." I tried 411 same thing. I dialed 611, the old centralized repair service that had been phased out in my area but which rings in a distant city served by the same telephone company. An operator said, "Can I have the number you're speaking from?" and I told her, "Thank you," ring, ring, ring, click, "This is telephone repair service. Can I have the number you're reporting, please?" I gave her the number. Oh sir, I'm sorry, that number is no longer served by our repair service. You'll have to call your local repair service number," which was the one I couldn't get through to. I said, "Operator, I tried calling that and I got a recording saying the number I called cannot be completed as dialed." And she said, "Well, I'm sorry, you'll just have to call and report it to your office." I said, "I cannot! Can you pass this information along to my repair service? There's something wrong with the phone line - it only dials you." I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to do that. I can't do that." So I hung up and called 611 again and the first operator popped on the line again, and I said, "Operator, I'm not going to give you the number I'm calling from I'm having a very difficult time. I called repair service; they were nasty and hateful and wouldn't respond to getting my phone fixed." I told her I had to call my local repair service, but was physically unable to. I asked if she could call it for me. "Certainly, I'll be glad to. What's your phone number and I'll call you back." I gave her the phone number, waited about 40 seconds and called her back. I asked, "What happened?" She said, "I got a recording when calling your number saying that my call couldn't be completed as dialed." OK, that's the problem, anybody trying to call my number gets that recording - anything I try to call gives me that recording." "Well, let me try to ring repair again." We ring repair service and get the same lady again. "Sir, I told you you're going to have to call your own repair service. Don't bother me with this anymore! I've told you we cannot help you here." I said, "Don't you have a phone there?" "Yeah." "Can't you pick it up and call my local repair service number? It's a seven-digit listed number, can you not call it?" "No, I cannot! It's not my duty; it's not my job. You should be able to do this yourself. You are going to have to go down to the repair service or use a [semi-]convenient pay phone," which is 10 miles away. Hell, the repair center is closer! I got in the car, red-faced with hysteria, and I drove in and called repair service from inside the telephone building. I went into a door marked "Employees only!" I just picked up the phone; no one was there. A person picked up and said, "Can I have the number you are reporting, please?" I yelled, "NO!" "What are you calling me for?" "I want to talk to somebody in person about my problem. I've got a terrible problem and it cannot be handled over the phone. Please come down the hallway - I'm somewhere in your building." She came in and I explained to her the rude treatment I got from centralized repair service. "I'm terribly sorry that happened...OK, you re going to have to come into the business office. Just go down the hall. Talk to one of our well-trained service representatives, and they will help you." 'Why can't you help me you're the repair service!" "Just take this form and hand it to the lady at the desk." I went to one of the service reps and went over the whole story again. While I was telling her this, I noticed a 75-year-old senior citizen right next to me talking to his rep. He had a very similar problem. He was getting nowhere. And I said to him, "You might as well take your telephone and throw it in the river, because you're not gonna get any service out of these people! They are the sorriest human beings that ever drew a breath. They don't give a damn about you. They certainly don't give a damn about me!" (I'm now yelling at the top of my lungs, by the way.) I said, "These people don't care about anything except collecting their paychecks. You might as well just leave!" All of the people in the telephone company were looking at me: all the customers, all the business reps. And I told them, any time I report anything there, I get treated like some sort of an asshole. For instance, two weeks earlier I had reported that pay phones in this particular prefix wouldn't dial 800 numbers. If you dialed an 800 number, you got a request to put in a 25 cent deposit. When I reported that, they said, "Yes, you must pay for your 800 number, like it was a local call." (You won't get your money back from the phone - they are Northern Telecom phones that don't have a return coin slot, so it can't give you your coin back.) I had told them, "It is a toll-free 800 number, hence the word 'toll-free'. You do not have to put in a quarter." All of the representatives said, "No, you've got to put in a quarter. You must pay for a toll-free 800 number." Well, to make a long story short, the young lady was so upset that I was yelling and screaming at everyone in there, that she took my record, dashed out of the room, came back and said, "I'm terribly sorry to have inconvenienced you. I'm sorry that you're upset - I notice you're red in the face. Your phone will be turned back on before you get home. It was just an error. Someone didn't pay their bill and it was one digit away from your number and it was all a mistake." The next day, I spoke to the vice president of the phone company and told him about my problem and the 800 incident, as well as a whole collection of other things that shocked and upset him. He said he was very grateful to me, and would consider hiring me as a consultant. Since that episode, things have gotten better. 800 numbers are now toll-free from pay phones and the repair service is a little bit better. But there are still plenty of problems almost every time you dial. You might say that it takes a phone phreak to straighten out a phone company. You might also say that Bell never looked so good. mistake.