smk@attunix.att.com (S M Krieger) (07/14/89)
After the fourth time in about a year and a half where I had a problem with an NJ Bell payphone, and the operator was anywhere from totally uncooperative to totally useless, I complained to the president of NJ Bell. The response I got was to the effect that if a payphone customer needs operator help because a payphone won't accept coins, the customer will be charged at the coin-deposit rate, once the NJB software is updated to let operators bill like that. Through this posting, I'd like to know what readers' experiences have been, both in NJ and elsewhere. In the four cases I complained about, I could not put coins in a payphone. In one case, a payphone was dead, but a "coinless" phone right next to it worked; in the second case, coins went right from the slot to the coin return, and in the other two cases, the slot was blocked (and as it was later explained to me, it meant the coin box was full). Also, in all four cases, only intra-LATA calls where involved (two local and two toll calls), and all the phones were NJ Bell phones. In all these cases, I called the operator (from the adjacent coinless phone in the first case, from the phone that didn't want my money in the other three cases), explained the problem, and the operator happily offered "alternative billing"; in all cases though, even a credit card call would have been more expensive than feeding in coins. In each case I said OK, but that she could bill my credit card only the amount of a coin-deposit call. In all cases, she refused, as did her supervisor. What finally prompted me to complain though was not the fact that the operator wouldn't work with me, but when, as usual I told the operator that she could charge only the coin deposit rate to my credit card, she merely repeated her question about alternate billing, and as I was repeating my response, she hung up on me. I have not encountered a payphone that didn't want my money since then, so I'm just curious to find out if others have had NJ Bell work with them in a case like this, as well as how this problem has been handled elsewhere (this letter and response were written about four months ago). -- Stan Krieger Summit, NJ ...!att!attunix!smk