Sheesh Pat!
Because of your extreme dislike of SBC you seem to have fallen for this advertisement written as a sob story about harrassing phone calls that "no one would do anything about." The story has all the earmarks of an urban ledgend -- no verifiable facts and no way to ascertain even if the story is true.
Rodgers Platt
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: All I can do is speak to my own experience. I was harassed for a couple months by AT&T (of all people!) who three or four times per day would call me on my ring-ring (distinctive ringing) line, looking for someone I had never heard of, and because of SBC's alleged inability to do anything to help me eventually _I_ had to invest in a long distance call at my own expense to call them back and trace through it with them. And SBC (to name just one of the Bell companies) absolutely refuses to do _anything_ about harassing phone calls except charge their _customer_ fifteen dollars for each use of *57. Bell used to have an 'Annoyance Call Bureau' to deal with those things; now apparently that has to be a profit center for them like everything else. PAT]