The Case of the Lost Phone Number

Did you know that a phone number can be "Lost"?

I am not sure how long we have had our home phone number, but I think it is somewhere around 20 years. You don't realize how significant that number is until you need it to get a haricut, refill a prescription, pick up the dry cleaning, get a discount at the grocery store, or order a pizza. And even though most friends and family have your cell number now, it is amazing how many professional, alumni, and volunteer organizations only have your home number. Then there are the vendors, repairmen, doctors, schools, and the old friends who knew you before you had a cell phone. All in all I figured it would take me hundreds of hours to make a list of people to notify and then to contact them all, so I was quite annoyed when my phone company informed me that our number had been "lost" and that there was no way to get it back.



It started about 18 months ago when a friend called Cherri's cell phone and told her that our home phone number just rang and rang and was not even answered by a machine. It was out for over a week before I notified the carrier, then I waited. After another week I called back and got more promises of "working on it". This went on for a about a month before the phone company confessed that a computer glitch had lost a couple of hundred phone numbers, but they were working on it and restoring a few each day. Each month for the next 6 months I would call to get an update on the status only to be told in the end that while most numbers were recovered, ours could not. In the mean time our number went from ringing to nowhere to being answered by some Asian language recording.

Our phone company explained that a third-party actually holds the numbers for them and most other small, independent, and most cell phone companies. They explained that only the "majors" hold their own phone numbers, so, this could have happened to anyone on any carrier (i.e. not thier fault). I repeatedly asked them to identify the third-party company, but they refused.

Eventually I filed a complaint with the FCC. The company responded to the complaint by saying that I agreed to a free year of service on a new number. The FCC seemed to find it reasonable that a phone number can be permanently lost and acceptable that being "told" what was going to happen is the same thing as "agreeing" to a solution. I never agreed to give up hope of getting my number back.

I have long had this idea that if anyone could get my number back it would probably be AT&T. I finally went on-line and signed up for service and requested to transfer my old number. I received a phone call from a customer service person who confirmed that they could get my number but it would take longer than their normal one day to switch; it would take two. Knowing the history of the number, I was not surprised when I received an email saying it would take an extra 4 days. I was surprised when I received and email on day 3 that my service was active.

I called the number from a cell phone, a VOIP line, and a land line with mixed results from ringing to busy signals, but no Asian recordings. Progress, and still not surprised because I know it takes a while to propogate changes throught all the routers in all the interconnected systems. I plugged in a plain old telephone at home to see if I could call out - no dial tone.

I figured I would give AT&T time to see what would happen. After a couple of more weeks I received my first bill and used that as the prompt to notify AT&T that my service did not work. I called the 800 number to report a service outage and worked my way through their automated system. They tested my line while I was on the phone and responded that it would be fixed by 8 o'clock that night - That's service!

The next morning I received a presonal phone call. They were sorry that they were not able to fix it last night, but that it had been escalated to the next level, they are currently working on it, and would someone be home if they had to send someone out? - but it would be fixed today!

I was still impressed with their commitment to service since I knew the history of the number. A few hours later I received a call from a field service guy, you know, a man with a truck full of tools. He was going out to our house to fix this. He asked how long the service had been out. I explained that I had not had a land line in many years and that I had just ported a troubled number back to AT&T.

A couple of hours later I received an automated call from AT&T explaining that they would not be able to get to my problem today. Again, not too disappointed given the problem that I had thrown their way. I was then shocked when Man-in-truck called back to say that he had fixed my service. Being a techie, I just had to ask him what the problem was. He said that there was no card in my service slot at their bunker at the front of my subdivision. "Somone probably noticed no dial tone on that line and used the card to fix another line". I was ecstatic that my service was finally back, laughing that a piece of hardware was missing, and amazed that they had actually gotten our number back in four days when others could not get it back at all.

Lesson Learned: I'm not sure. I am thankful to AT&T for getting my number back. I don't know how long I am going to be willing to pay twice the price for basic phone service. I think I will probably go back to VOIP at some point. Now to go cancel my current VOIP service.