gonzalez@BBN.COM (01/26/89)
I once had trouble with a phone number. It happened that a business in a neighboring town had posted an ad in a trade journal with a botched exchange. I got calls every few weeks for nearly a year. Once I had figured out what had happened, I contacted the company, and passed the customer contacts along to them. They never repeated the ad, the calls dwindled, and then I moved and got a different phone number. A former co-worker had a place in Boston with a number very close to one for a phone sex service. Needless to say, she got several amsusing calls from men who fat-fingered (a piano player's term) the number. Some of these guys apparently got quite annoyed when she refused to accept their credit card numbers and call back as promised in the ad. To make matters worse, her mom was visiting one week, and reportedly had a long (30 minutes or more) conversation with some guy. Her mom didn't take his credit card number, but did coyly advise my friend that a guy had called for her, and left his number. Recent grumblings about the decline of US phone service, particularly with regard to hotel add-on charges, inspired a cute thought. In Europe, hotels have been ripping people off for years on long distance. Also, the general opinion and personal experience has been that phone service in Europe is inferior to ours. With the all the fawning over Euro-style, European formula, and European engineering, I suppose it's only logical that we also aspire to a European-quality phone system (:-). Having grown up with the offspring of Murray Hill types, and learning phone tricks from the Jersey Bell repair guys, I must admit to a certain nostalgia. Paying 60 cents for a domestic long-distance directory assistance call also contributes to my sense of loss. I miss Ma Bell. -Jim. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jim Gonzalez AT&T: 617-873-2937 BBN Systems and Technologies Corp. ARPA: gonzalez@bbn.com Cambridge, Massachusetts UUCP: ...seismo!bbn!gonzalez ----------------------------------------------------------------------