J'Accuse!J'Accuse!
by sonya hammond
It should not be surprising to anyone forced to use a phone these days that telephone workers recently went out on strike in droves. The only surprise is that they beat the suffering public to it, and we should offer them our wholehearted support.
The striker's complaints may not have coincided exactly with ours, but when it comes to telephone companies, there are few limits to the sins of which they may be accused.
It all started when the government decided the telephone industry needed deregulation. Prior to deregulation, the American phone-calling public had been serviced by a monopoly which the government considers a bad thing.
This resulted in the birth of an entirely new industry ... millions of long-distance carriers whose primary raison d'etre is to call every American at least 3 times a week, preferably while they are eating dinner, having sex, or taking a bath, in order to offer them long-distance service available by dialing a number only a couple of digits different than their competitors'. Resistance to these calls is futile, as those who inadvertently find themselves hooked up to a new carrier soon discover.
Eventually competition waned as the public, hard pressed to remember which number to dial to get any long distance carrier, had the temerity to settle for one and stick with it. Naturally it became necessary for phone companies, and the bottom-feeding vendors of their software, to look for new sources of revenue by resorting to technology.
Convinced that by constantly upgrading their phone systems with robotic technology they could avoid all personal contact, companies freed employees to do more important stuff like devising menus of buttons the public must push in order to hear more button choices, most of which eventually connect them to insincere messages that while their calls are considered 'terribly important', it is doubtful anyone will ever be free to answer them.
It has become extremely unlikely that any business transaction by phone will ever again involve speaking to a person, dooming us to lives regulated by computer chips, most of which are destined to expire in Y2K. We can look forward to spending our remaining years hoping to convince any extant machines that we still exist, while praying for rescue from listening to Liberace's' Greatest Hits, interspersed with recorded suggestions that we call back, preferably in the next millenium. In Y2K, of course, none of this will apply to calls made to government agencies, all of whose phones will be disconnected for non-payment of bills suddenly backdated to 1900.
As if all that were not enough to drive us to rebel against our phone 'service', we have recently been advised that if we don't start using more of it, we can expect retaliation.
In a society that pleads for restraint ... walk -- don't drive, re-cycle, protect endangered species, ban insecticides, save more/spend less, quit smoking, use condoms ... one of the world's largest and richest public 'servants' has announced that restraint is bad; excess is good. Shame on those of us who do not make sufficient long-distance telephone calls! We are not contributing our share to AT&T's stockholders.
AT&T snivels that it needs a new fee to cover costs incurred by those of us who resist excessive long-distance calling, an obscure principle of economics that involves our paying $3 a month for not doing something that would not require AT&T to do anything in the first place.
Based on this theory [which banks are already trying to implement], any day now we can expect to be charged for not earning enough money to pay taxes, thereby burdening the IRS with the costs of not processing our tax returns.
Rendered guilty without benefit of trial, we shall be punished by AT&T's 'minimum fee' for our thoughtless telephonic restraint. Too bad if we have no distant cousins in another state. Tough cookies if our friends and relatives have the misfortune to live within our calling area. We have no excuse ... AT&T makes it easy for us to spend 10˘ a minute providing we call someone with a more exotic area code, we do it often enough to balance their profit/loss statements, and we don't violate any of the 865,000 restrictions listed in type too small for humans to read.
It won't do a bit of good to call AT&T to complain about this non-user fee, unless you enjoy jousting with a telephonic menu designed to lead sinners down a path strewn with buttons to long-distance conversion.
A possible ploy is to write them ... check out www.att.com. Clicking your mouse a few times is a small price for avoiding Liberace, and with any luck you'll help to clog up AT&T's e-mail until Y2K. Local callers of the world, unite! En Solidaridad!
Update: Due to lack of interest, and fleeing customers, AT&T eventually rescinded the 'minimum usage' fee, but with very little effort you can probably think of something else to write them about ... like all those damned button choices.
İsonya hammond 1999