Oh it gets better than that. Firmly into the DMS-100 era I had moved back into the capitol city and informed then Nynex of the move. Got my new number assigned and the line was installed, I signed for it and my service was working.
Well -- a month goes by and no bill. Hmmm. Another month goes by and still no bill. This went on for a year. All through that year I'd call Nynex and tell them my phone number and they'd say there was no record of it.
Finally after a year of trying they accepted my word for it and set it up as an account. I paid them something like $150 or so for the service and all was said and done.
But then I wasn't getting billed for my long distance calls.
About 6 months later I found out why. At the time I had 401-273-0716 and the local VA hospital had and still has 401-273-7016. A transposition of two digits was billing all my long distance calls to the VA hospital.
I found out because a friend in New Jersey knew of my phone phreak ways and called and asked how I'd managed to hack in to the VA's phone system. At that point I'd moved and got a new number so that ended that.
Nynex still used paper records that were sent from plant to billing. My paperwork mysteriously got lost. Imagine.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This same thing happened once to me also, in 1975-76. I was living in an apartment hotel on the near north side of Chicago. Although the building (like many such places in those times) has a switchboard serving tenant apartments, many tenants also had their own private telephones, as did I. My _private_ phone was put in about a month after I moved into the building, but Illinois Bell never did get around to sending me a bill. Not for about a year. When I finally realized what was going on, I took a couple steps to _insure_ the status would not change: The line was set up as 'unlimited call pack' meaning there would never be any charges for extra units. I did not _ever_ make any long distance calls on that line, so there would never be any 'coin-rated' calls, or reason for any tickets to get written up to later 'fall out' in billing when the account could not be found anywhere. That worked fine, and got me by for several months; I suppose most of a year.Then one day, some $#%%#$ phreak had the audacity to give _my_ number for billing on some fraud credit card he was using. Sure enough, before long the charges came though the system to the accounting department; when no account could be found (because plant had never submitted a copy of the order to accounting after they turned me on), the charge fell out, and went into the suspense ledger, sat there for a month or two until some overworked telco investigator who spent all of her days tracking down charges like this got around to working on the one charge which was 'mine'. Assuming there is no folio, or ledger for the number (which usually means no such number) the investigator tried a different approach, _actually dialing the number._ Instead of getting the usual tones and the 'number not in service' message which she expected, in this case the number actually rang, (although no answer because I was not at home), and therefore the number _was_ in service. She called plant and asked when the paperwork would come through, not expecting to be told it had gone through (but apparently gotten lost or not actually submitted) a _year prior_. Well!
Investigator promptly writes up a bill for me for service for the past year, plus the usual month in advance, plus the requested security deposit. I get it in the mail a couple days later along with the long distance charge the phreak had charged to my bill. I called my service rep, tried to act indignant, etc and asked my rep to please write off all these charges on account of you never billed me to start with. Miss Prissy (my favorite rep, who I always seemed to get) said to me no deal ... "because, Mr. Townson, you _knew_ what was happening. You knew that was a mistake you hoped we would not find." She finally agreed "I will let you have two or three months to raise the money and pay the bill; there are many reps here who would place you in collection immediatly, but yeah, it was partly our fault (although you could have told us sooner and not let us find it on our own), so I will give you two or three months to clear it all up. Oh, and I will remove the security deposit requirement; you've had the phone for about a year now; I'll also write off the long distance charge which was put on your bill by the phreak." I was ill in a position to argue with her that much, or act too indignant. PAT]