wmartin@stl-06sima.army.mil (Will Martin) (07/28/89)
I am in total agreement with you on this. I posted some traffic to Telecom on this subject back when DA calls first began being charged for. It amazed me that the system was not implemented in the first place to accomodate *necessary* DA calls -- those for numbers not in the book. I could not understand why the charging mechanism would not depend on that -- if the customer could have looked it up but was too lazy, they should pay. If they couldn't look it up because it wasn't there to be looked up, there is no justification for charging for the DA call. In fact, if I spent time and effort trying to look up a number that isn't in the book, I can see justification in *my* charging the telco for *my* wasted time and effort! :-) Maybe we should devise a "customer bill" form that we'd send to the telco along with our monthly payments, detailing *our* charges to them, based on what they did, or failed to do, and deduct that total from what we pay the telco! Let's see -- every time you try to use a payphone and find no phone books there, a "frustration & annoyance" charge of $2.00; attempting to use a payphone and find it isn't working is a $5.00 "F&A" charge. Fighting a COCOT overcharge is $15.00 per hour F&A... $1.00 for digging thru a phone book and not finding a listing (it should be higher than what the telco charges us for a DA lookup, because they have consoles and databases to make the retrieval quick and easy, whilst we have to juggle heavy paper books and cope with fine print)... :-) I'm sure others on the list can devise many other appropriate charges! When I brought up this subject years ago, I recall some respondents came back with an argument that the DA operators had no way to signal that the current DA call in progress was to be charged or not. I had figured that they could just hit some button on their consoles to indicate that the current call was regarding a number not in the book (that being coded in their database like you mentioned) and so the call was free. People on the list claimed that wasn't possible. But now they DO have the capability to not charge handicapped people who cannot look up numbers due to some disability -- that exemption is fairly generally implemented, I believe. If they can discriminate the charging based on that, they certainly can do so based on other criteria! Regards, Will Martin