CHAPTER TWELVE
Wanda called me first thing the next morning. The date was September 11th. With little preamble, she asked me when the service order to switch me away from AT&T had been placed.
It took me a second to flip through notes and find the date. “On or around July 6,” I finally replied, curious as to why she was asking.
“And the order was to switch your lines to what carrier?”
Some quick background here. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that just because you do business with a particular phone company, it does not mean that you are exclusively doing business with that particular phone company. The way the system seems to work is that I sign up with PNG, then they go out and buy or lease or somehow gain access to time on someone else’s network (like Verizon or Worldcom or MCI) and then resell that time to me, presumably at a profit. When phone lines are assigned to a PIC code, the computers that drive all this stuff are told whose lines are being used (like Verizon), and who to charge that usage to (like PNG). The use of names seems to be incidental. Everything is driven by the programming of PIC Codes.
“It may have been MCI,” I replied, “but I’m not really sure. All I know with certainty is that the proper PIC Code is supposed to be 0555.”
“Well, according to the records I can access,“ she says, “I don’t see where you were ever shifted to MCI, or anyone else, but your service from AT&T was dropped on August 16th.”
“Meaning……what? All of the phones are and have been working, so when you say service was “dropped”, what do you mean?”
Whereupon she explained to me that since August 16th, none of our lines have any longer been part of an AT&T calling plan. After my old plan – which provided a packaged rate structure – was discontinued, “all of your local call activity has defaulted to AT&T, and all of your long distance has converted to default”.
That’s a quote folks. I’m not making it up.
I asked if she could put that explanation into English.
“What it means,” she said, “is that as of August 16th, your long distance carrier has been unassigned. That means that whenever you made a call, the charge rolled to any available carrier.”
Two heartbeats later my eyes were nearly bugging out of my head and my blood pressure had me on the threshold of a stroke. I was close to saying something I’d probably still be regretting when she said, “No. Wait. That’s wrong.” There was a long silence. I waited. Then, “Actually, it looks like your long distance activity defaulted back to AT&T as well.”
My pulse rate dropped ever so slightly.
“Which means?” I asked.
“Well, it’s hard to say,” she replied. “The plan you were part of gave you special rates. Under the default pricing, you would be charged standard rates.”
“What default pricing?” I replied, “Pretty clearly someone at AT&T got my cancellation order. Now you’re telling me what? That it took them almost six weeks to do something with it, and when they finally got around to actually throwing the switches or whatever it is you folks do, they failed to program in the PIC codes they were supposed to? Is that reasonably accurate?”
“Um……maybe.”
“And this would be despite the fact that back in July, I received confirmation that my order had been received and processed.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Uh-huh. So right now, we’re not sure what rates I’m being charged. Is that also accurate?”
“Well, um………”
I was getting a headache.
“I can see it now, my next phone bill is going to be for $40,000.”
She hurriedly but unconvincingly replied that such a thing shouldn’t happen. No kidding. In the meantime, she promised to continue working on uncovering what is going on. “Sit tight”, she said, “and I’ll get back to you.”
And there they were, those words again.
“I’ll get back to you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A full week went by during which I never heard a word from Wanda. Similarly, I never heard from anyone purporting to be a subordinate, a substitute, a peer, a superior, an associate, a friend, neighbor, relative, assignee, assignor, successor, impersonator, replacement, parole officer, bartender, hairstylist or former classmate of Wanda. It’s like Wanda failed to even exist, as if she disappeared from the face of the Earth, a talent that was beginning to look like a required skill set for anyone even remotely associated with AT&T. Jimmy cracked corn and I don’t care. Though I was disappointed, I was not even a little surprised.
Meanwhile, a couple thousand dollar invoice had been sitting on my desk, unpaid, for a few weeks, the amount in dispute, the questions surrounding it unanswered and unresolved. The primary issue, of course, was the “Contract Commitment Charge” of nearly fifteen hundred bucks. The due date of the invoice was September 14, 2009. It was now the 18th of September. Even though I remained stuck waiting for answers from AT&T, I saw new complications popping up on the horizon if the entire balance remained ignored.
Given that the amount charged for the billing period ended July 15 had not been in dispute, I compared the current invoice to the previous month. By my estimate, call activity for the two months should have been about the same. Even though there should have been no long distance charges of any kind on the current invoice, I decided to recognize and pay them anyway. After all, this bill was in place of what PNG would have otherwise sent me, not in addition to. I figured I owed it to someone. So, on the 18th I wrote a check for the amount of the July invoice, made it payable to AT&T, changed the amount on the payment slip, and dropped it all into the mail.
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Another week passed and I still heard from………well, you know the story. I heard from no one.
On September 24, a new monthly AT&T bill arrived, this one for the period ending September 15, 2009. What I was about to open, of course, would reflect whatever had occurred after service from AT&T was “dropped” on August 16th.
To my everlasting relief, the invoice was not for $40,000 as I had feared. It was, however, for an amount that was just north of $5,000.
Not too surprisingly, the previous month’s balance was listed as unpaid and overdue. That issue had already been addressed, so it wasn’t something I was going to lose any sleep over. However, after backing that out, new charges for the current month totaled just shy of three thousand dollars.
As a point of comparison, if I had kept AT&T as my long distance provider, a reasonable total for the invoice would have been around $450.00. If they had processed my change orders as instructed, it would have been a little over $300.00. It was, instead, nearly ten times that amount. The term license to steal came to mind.
How did they do it? A quick scan of the details revealed that on the 16th of August, my billing plan of $.05 per minute with ten-second billing increments had been jacked up to $.67 per minute with full-minute billing. Spread over the course of 27 pages worth of itemized history, detailing over 2,500 individual calls, well, let’s just say it had a measurable impact on the total invoice amount.
I knew I needed to come up with a game plan to combat this, but I really had no idea where to turn, what to try to do next. How do you fight a multi-billion dollar conglomerate that apparently has both the inclination and ability to do whatever they want, to whomever they want to do it?
I had tried to discontinue my relationship with them. I knew it, they knew it, they knew I knew they knew it, yet they were basically telling me to kiss off, and then daring me to try to do something about it. By available evidence, they seemed to think that since they owned and controlled all of the systems that drive telecommunications, they had not only the ability, but the right, to do whatever they wanted with it. In a very bad turn of events for me, their tactics were now becoming downright Stalin-esque.
At least that’s what I thought at the time. Little did I know there was more to come.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Two business days later, on the morning of September 28th, I was informed that four of our seven phone lines seemed to be down. Sure, I thought. Why not?
Lines 1 and 2, I discover, when used, led to a recording that said, “Your call cannot be completed because your toll service has been blocked”. Lines 3 and 5, when used, led to a recording that said, “the number you have reached is not in service”. The latter is particularly perplexing in that to test the severity of the impediment, I called the business next door, the local post office, even my own house, and despite dialing numbers that were unquestionably in service, we got the same recording every time.
Lines 4, 6 and 7, for reasons unknown, seemed to be working okay. Thus four out of seven had been effectively shut down.
During a recent conversation with one of the phone companies, I had been told that there is a phone number than can be dialed from any phone line which will produce a recording that announces who the long distance carrier is for that line. On this day I dialed that number (1-700-555-4141) seven times. When I did, on six of those lines, including the four that did not work, I got a recording saying that MCI was my long distance carrier. On the seventh line, a recording told me that the carrier was NOS Communications.
I recalled a discussion with Wanda Devereaux held back on September 11th. I recalled the name MCI having come up. I also recalled the unequivocal guidance that maybe I was trying to get hooked up to MCI, maybe not……but that I wanted my lines set to PIC Code 0555.
A series of rhetorical questions swarmed through my mind. There was no way to know what exactly was going on, but I found myself unable to ignore the notion that Wanda “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” Devereaux may have had something to do with it. And, if she did, I not only wanted to know why and how, but I wanted to know how the hell NOS Communications got into this story.
Folks, most of the time I’m a reasonably calm individual. I try to take things in stride, to not dwell on things I can’t control, to not get too hung up on the little stuff. For the most part, I succeed.
But on this day, that wasn’t the case. I was angry. Real angry.
I decided to take the same approach I’d taken the last time I needed information. I called PNG first.
That was when I discovered that I could not make a long distance call on any line.
As I said, four lines led to dead end recordings. While the other three went through, they did so with so much noise and static that they were effectively dead as well. I actually got through to PNG twice, but on both occasions, the person at the other end of the line could not hear me. I eventually used my cell phone to make the call.
Late on that morning of September 28th, I finally got a call to PNG to go through.
A woman named Amy Mounce took the call.
