Subject: Equal Access?? My foot!! Date: 27 Jan 89 15:54:59 GMT Should I ask Harold Green For $30.00? ===================================== Here is a tale of woe. We were in Florida on vacation when I tried to make a call from the hotel room phone to Chicago. Wanting to use the AT&T as a long distance carrier (I am an employee plus I get a discount), I dialed an operator and got an "International Telecharge" operator somewhere in Texas. When I asked to be connected to an AT&T operator, the reply was "we cannot do that" (!!). So I went to a payphone on the street and got exactly the same result!!! The "equall access code" (i.e. 01-288) did not work either. So I asked the ITI operator how can I go about making a long distance call using AT&T, her answer was that if I dial direct using my AT&T credit card, the call would be automatically billed to AT&T. Somehow that did not sound right to me, but I went ahead and dialed DIRECTLY using AT&T card. What choice did I have at that point anyway? Well, you may have guessed it. When the bill came, all the calls were billed as International Telecharge Operator Assisted (!!) calls. The price? About $1.25 a minute for a late evening call from Florida (Marco Island) to Chicago. I can call Europe for less than that! I called Illinois Bell and Southern Bell consumer affair departments and basically their answer was, sorry, but that is the way it is. I guess I am out of 30 bucks and somewhat wiser. But if this is what the deregulation was all about, I think it stinks. Peter Pavlovcik, att!iexist!peter [Moderator's Note: Yep, that is what degregulation is all about. Why don't you write Harold Greene and tell him what a mess he has made of the phone network. Share his response with us, if he deigns to answer you.] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 27 Jan 89 02:09:57 PST From: Keith Brown To: lll-winken!ames!killer!vector!telecom-request Subject: Re: Victims of Wrong Numbers Along these same (wrong number confusion) lines... A local fraternal organization (which should remain nameless except they're probably most- known for their in-lodge bar rather than community efforts) has a number just like our's except for the rolled last digit pair. Well, we're used to the "Is Harry there (spoken just like your grandfather would 'bark' it when he felt ornery at not being able to find his buddy)?" But one day a couple of years ago, one of our local matrons called us accidentally; and in a very stuporous state, wanted all kinds of company. I'd even do, it didn't matter that this wasn't the lodge, or that I didn't belong to the lodge, or that I was, oh, 30 years her junior. As the Teaneck or Brentwood of Oregon, this just isn't what I'd expected from our locals. Oh well, I'd seen The Graduate. -Keith Keith Brown UUCP: {decvax allegra ucbcad ucbvax hplabs ihnp4}!tektronix!reed!keithb BITNET: keith@reed.BITNET ARPA: keithb%reed.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu CSNET: reed!keithb@Tektronix.CSNET CIS: 72615,216 ------------------------------ To: gatech!comp-dcom-telecom From: ut-emx!rick@cs.utexas.edu (Rick Watson) Subject: Re: Victims of Wrong Numbers Date: 30 Jan 89 02:48:49 GMT We used to have 454-1212 (remember what 555-1212 is). We got pretty good at just looking up the number in the book for the unsuspecting caller. My roomate would look up the number and then see how much time he could spend getting the caller to talk about the weather in their part of the country, etc. Rick Watson University of Texas Computation Center arpa: watson@utadnx.cc.utexas.edu (128.83.1.26) uucp: ...cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!rick bitnet: watson@utadnx span: utspan::watson (UTSPAN is 25.128) phone: 512/471-8220 512/471-3241 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest *********************