roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (09/26/90)
A few weeks ago, I told a story about what I had to go through to place an AT&T calling card call from a phone in a Manhattan (area code 212) hospital room to Mt. Sinai on Long Island (516). Various people suggested I was silly to use the calling card at all, since that forced me to pay Long Distance rates on what many people suspected was really an intra-LATA call. Anyway, I got my Universal Card bill yesterday. There's the call; placed to Port Jefferson (next town over from Mt. Sinai, so that's OK) at the right time and date. The kicker is where the call was placed from: Orange, NJ (201)! I called the customer service 800 number to enquire about this, and got no good explanation as to why the call originated from the NJ number. What was really interesting, was she suggested that it actually came out cheaper that way, since you only get the 10% discount (rounded up, BTW, $0.20 on a $1.95 call) on calls between area codes. I pointed out that Manhattan and Port Jeff are not the same area code, and requested the rate to Port Jefferson, NY from both Manhattan, NY and Orange, NJ. She said they were exactly the same. Now I'm really confused. Two questions. Is it reasonable that the rates from Manhattan and Orange, NJ are really identical? And (more interesting) why is the call shown as originating in New Jersey at all?