Ernestine Lives!

You remember Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, do you not? She was one of Lily's first major hit characters, way back from (ah, I do so hate showing my age) Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. One of Ernestine's best observations was, "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."

Despite the truth of that statement, I objected to the court-ordered break-up of the Bell System in the mid-1980s. I abhor trusts, but I also recognize the everyday reality that a telephone is in essence a utility; thus, it should be run as a quasi-monopoly, but for the public good, not for private profit.

Not that my long-standing objections ever mattered, but the FCC of late has by inaction allowed most of the Bell companies to re-merge . . . not for the public good, however and alas, but for private exorbitant profits.

The latest "ferinstance": AT&T has stripped the last vestige of "service" from the concept of "customer service." Should you decide you'd like to pay your AT&T bill in person (maybe you're in the mall and you know the bill is coming due and you decide, spur-of-the-moment, to walk in to the AT&T store to pay, just to have one less thing to do later), AT&T is going to charge you an extra $2.00. Yup. You read that right. You have to pay more for AT&T to take your money from you in person.

As if that weren't bad enough, AT&T defends this extra charge on the grounds that the time of AT&T reps is valuable, thus you should pay more for taking up that time.

I must be old-fashioned. That strikes me as being exactly backwards. AT&T should be giving you a discount for paying in person and early/on time, not discouraging you from providing it with revenues. What do these AT&T reps have to do that's more valuable to AT&T than literally bringing in the money that pays for (among other things) their salaries? I just can't fathom it.

Well, that's not entirely true. I can fathom it just fine. I just do not care at all for what I fathom, which is AT&T is going to ding you for every single thing at every chance it gets, just like every other business in the world, rather than being willing to accept that some things are just part of its expenses of doing business in the first place.

The Irish are correct: there's many a dry eye at a moneylender's funeral.