Lack of Competition Sucks: Telephones
I just called the phone company to see about keeping my phone number when I move. They told me that since I would be moving from zone one to zone sixteen, I would not be able to keep my number. Great. They'll do a "calls for this number are being accepted by" message for ninety days. I can beg them to extend it for another ninety. I've only been handing out quartet business cards with the old number for three years now. I can only hope that people would look at the web site if the phone number doesn't work, but I suspect that's optimism. I'm sure it will be prohibitively expensive to get the number to dump directly to voicemail somewhere or have it forwarded. Grrrrrrr!
This is double frustrating because cellular numbers are now portable across different companies, but local phone numbers are not guaranteed to be portable within a single company. I'd like to punish the phone company by not getting a land line at my new place, but then my TiVo would stop working. Grr!
The only good news is that our next 1,000 cards will have my cellular number, which obviously will not be changing.
This is double frustrating because cellular numbers are now portable across different companies, but local phone numbers are not guaranteed to be portable within a single company. I'd like to punish the phone company by not getting a land line at my new place, but then my TiVo would stop working. Grr!
The only good news is that our next 1,000 cards will have my cellular number, which obviously will not be changing.