Fie On Ma Bell’S Evil Descendent

Once upon a time, this nation had a marvelous telephone system that efficiently served rich and poor. It was run by American Telephone & Telegraph Co., which handled virtually any phone problem.

For reasons I never entirely understood, the federal courts decided to break up AT&T. The result was a lot of smaller telephone companies that got bought and sold, and constantly changed names.

It has been downhill ever since. In this part of the world, the palace that had been AT&T’s Bell Telephone System has become a dump whose slumlord now goes under the name of Verizon.

You see, I’m sore. I’m sore because I’ve been without telephone service for three weeks. During these weeks, I’ve called Verizon’s repair number about 25 times. I could never get a person to answer, of course. I couldn’t even get an answering machine. All I could get was a message, “All circuits are busy.”

In other words, get lost.

During Verizon’s two-week strike, I kept my peace. But after the strike ended, I continued to call the repair number and would hear, “All circuits are busy.” It began to boggle the mind. Here is Verizon running all these expensive ads for its fancy wireless offerings but it is incapable of operating a phone line for its repair service.

I don’t like to do this but I was desperate. I had a friend call a friend who works at Verizon. It almost worked. A technician came to my house while I was away and determined that the problem concerned the wiring inside the house. I learned this from a recorded message on my answering service, which still worked. The guy didn’t leave a number, so I was back to the all-circuits-are-busy line. Meanwhile, the friend of a friend went off on vacation. And the state Public Utilities Commission couldn’t and/or would not do a thing.

During this time, I occasionally bummed calls from local merchants. They were highly sympathetic. One merchant said he was hearing from numerous phoneless Verizon customers who were stuck in the same sad boat.

I told our newsroom that our city’s local phone service had collapsed. A reporter inquired into the allegation and a Verizon spokeswoman asserted to him that everything was back to normal. She was probably told to lie. Despite the dead lines all over town, the company is out there trying to find new victims.

My editor grew tired of having his colleague spend half her day running around in a vain effort to get telephone service. He called the paramount local Verizon spokeswoman and she called me. She further fueled my growing rage by telling me that she had just called the repair number and had no difficulty getting through.

Then, in a classic Providence move, she went into retaliation mode. She noted that I had not signed up for the company’s wire-maintenance plan. This is a monthly fee that some customers pay to cover any work on the inside wires and jacks.

The same page in the telephone book that lists the all-circuits-are-busy repair number contains the information that the company does repair inside wires for a minimum charge. And if I didn’t have a friend who has a friend at Verizon, I would have never gotten anyone to even tell me where the trouble was.

Minutes later, another public-relations lady called me and said that she, too, had no problem getting through to the repair number. I began to question my sanity and urged several colleagues at the Journal to try the number. None of them could get through.

I have since arranged with a company in Cranston, R.I., to come over and fix whatever’s wrong with the inside wiring. The guy who answered the phone told me he was getting calls from people who were already paying for Verizon’s wire-maintenance plan. Out of desperation, they were willing to pay twice to get their phones fixed.

Moi? I hope that by the time you read this I’ll again have local phone service. In the meantime, I’m investigating ways to sever my relationship with Verizon. There are some wireless packages that may be able to replace the phone company line.

And there’s one other thing I can do: I can curse the day they broke up Ma Bell.