From: mercadal@diablonet.net   
      
   Hi folks,   
      
   I was recently recommended your newsgroup, and I see that I missed   
   some discussion a couple months back on ten-digit dialing becoming   
   mandatory in rather a large number of area codes.  Here's a brief   
   story of how poorly the changeover went for my aging, technology-phobic   
   father.   
      
   About three weeks ago I got a call from my aunt, frantic, that my   
   dad's phone had been disconnected.  She called the phone company   
   to help him get his landline turned back on, but after many hours   
   on the phone with AT&T customer service, and even after eventually   
   findng a sypmethetic employee who said the service could be restored,   
   the promised restoration of his landline never happened as she was   
   told it would in the week thereafter.   
      
   Rewind a couple more weeks, and my dad, as he later explained to   
   me, was having difficulty dialing out on his home phone, and he   
   thought his cordless phone was the culprit. (He kept telling me he   
   thought the '6' button on the keypad was not dialing right, so his   
   calls wouldn't complete -- which might be a touch of senility.) In   
   hopes of fixing it, he went to a local AT&T store.   
      
   >From what he told me, he told his problem to the technicians there,   
   who set him up with a cell phone ... and, as he could not explain   
   to me, but later became apparent, the store also ported his landline   
   number to the cell phone.  Now my dad is much more easily confused   
   by technology than the average person, and resultigly he had a   
   non-operable landline at this point, and a cell phone he couldn't   
   figure out how to operate or activate.   
      
   To make things simple, once it was clear his old landline number   
   wasn't coming back, I called AT&T and ordered him a new landline.   
   (I figured maybe I can port away his old landline number to a SIP   
   provider and call foward it to him eventually.)  It was set up in   
   just the span of a couple hours.  I called him on it after it was   
   provisioned and he complained about getting the "you must also   
   include an area code" intercept message when making outbound local   
   calls.   
      
   Now wondering if my dad had totally lost his marbles, it was only   
   this evening, as I was catching up in my newsreader and saw the   
   ten-digit dialing articles here that it clicked: I think the ten-digit   
   dialing switchover in October confused him, and he thought his   
   phone's buttons were not functioning right, which set off all the   
   other troubles mentioned above.   
      
   I'm hopeful I can call him tomorrow and explain to him this is just   
   the way it is now, and that he'll remember it the next time he goes   
   to dial. What a mess to have to sort out, though, and I just keep   
   ruminating on the number of ways this could have gone otherwise to   
   have this not have gone all wrong.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)