I really love the interweb. Sometimes I’ll go look something up, and then 3 hours late I realize I’ve been reading reams of interesting information.
This morning I got a call on my cell phone, which was in another room and I really didn’t feel like getting out of bed to catch it. I mean, no one really knows my cell phone number, including me, so I figured it was a wrong number.
When I got up, I looked up the number on Google but it had no match, so I checked the area code. This led me to a fascinating page on Wikipedia about area codes and the way they are designed and administrated. Hey, did you know that there is a plan in the works to expand our telephone numbers by one or two digits? Can’t wait for the uproar over that one, can you?
I then wound my way through the web and read all kinds of information about the Bell System, took a tangent to learn about the horrible Eastland disaster, where more than 800 people were killed in the capsize of a boat on the Chicago river, and then learned how the familiar “intercept” for wrong numbers worked. (This is the announcement that “The number you have reached: 5 5 5 1 2 1 2 is not in service.” High tech: it was a magnetic cylinder with 96 tracks of recorded sound, reading heads actuated along the surface of the drum to play back the recorded segments in the correct order. This was a long time before digitized audio, pal.)
And perhaps the coolest artifact I’ve found so far: this telephone bill from here in San Jose, dated 1899:
Despite all the price gouging and shady accounting prevalent in the old Bell System/AT&T monopoly, it still seems as though the price for basic telephone service is far more expensive today than it should be. I don’t think that the phone companies have ever actually reduced prices. For example, when they started charging for 411 calls, the explanation was that we’d all been paying for them previously because it was built into the basic rate. The thing is, when they started billing for them separately, did they reduce the basic rate? Nope. We’ve all been paying double for so many things on the phone bill for so long… heck I believe there is still a tax on the bill for the Spanish-American War.
I haven’t had traditional telephone service for years now. I have Vonage for my home phone, and I have a 703 and 408 number as well as an 800 number. I’m still paying $20 per month less than I did for one regular phone number before I switched. I think the time has come for the old phone companies to rethink their pricing structure… although, customer inertia is on their side.
