We’ve had a “corporate account” with ATT for our business phone line for several months, during which time we’ve received several bills and paid them promptly. Don’t ask me why we switched to ATT in the first place; it’s a long story, but I think we previously had Verizon as a long-distance carrier. I don’t really know, and I don’t care. My wife handles all those details, and her primary goal in life is to reduce the number of telco vendors that we deal with (local calls, long distance, two mobile phones, two BlackBerries, a wireless modem provider for my laptop, various email/Internet providers, etc.) to as small a number as possible.

For the last several months, if not longer, all of this has been fairly stable and predictable: the phones work, we have various ways of accessing the Internet, the bills come in, the payment checks go out, everything seems fine. Everything seemed fine this morning, too, during which time I placed roughly half a dozen long-distance phone calls to clients, colleagues, and friends around the country. But shortly after lunch, I picked up the phone and dialed a Colorado number, and immediately got a recorded message from someone claiming to be part of ATT, telling me there was a “disruption” on my account, and that I should hold on to speak to a customer representative.

At first, I thought I had somehow misdialed the number, and had inadvertently contacted Dick Cheney in an underground bunker. So I hung up, re-dialed the number, and got the same recorded message. This time, I held on for a few seconds, and found myself to a polite, but not-particularly-friendly ATT representative who began asking a series of questions. Was my account a “corporate” account, or a “residence” account? Jeez, I don’t know … we’ve got our office at home, but this is the corporate phone number I’m calling from, so I assume it’s a corporate account. What number was I trying to call? Colorado, 303-blah-blah-blah. Well, that number seems fine; so what number are you calling from? New York City, 212-blah-blah-blah.

There was a brief pause at that point, after which he asked, in a ever-so-slightly suspicious tone, “What phone company do you have your long-distance service with?” Ummm … well, I’m talking to you at ATT, right? So I would have assumed our long-distance was being provided by ATT, right? But then I hesitated; I vaguely recalled my wife telling me that even though our bill came from Verizon, and Verizon provided the service for local calls in New York City, the long-distance service was being provided by ATT, even though the charges for those services showed up on the Verizon bill. Or maybe it was the other way around? Maybe it was a bill from ATT, but the long-distance service was being provided by Verizon? Who knows? Who cares? Once upon a time, Verizon used to be NYNEX, and before that it was New York Telephone, and it was part of ATT. I can’t keep all these things straight…

I don’t really know for sure, I finally admitted to the anonymous voice on the phone… at which point he got a little huffy, and asked me whether I was in charge of the telephone service in our company. Ummm … no, I replied. I mean, I’m supposed to be in charge of everything in our company, but my wife pays all the bills and writes all the checks, and she’s not here right now.

“Well,” said Mr. Anonymous-Voice, with an air of doom and foreboding, “it looks like your account has been dropped. You’d better call 777-blah-blah-blah right away, because if you’ve got ten numbers on your corporate account, they’re probably dropping one by one right now…”

Holy cow! All we’ve got is one corporate line, and one personal line, but I really needed to make that call to Colorado; so I hung up on Mr. Anonymous-Voice, switched to the personal line, and made the call without any trouble — thinking to myself, meanwhile, that if that didn’t work, I’d simply use my cell phone, which (to my wife’s dismay) involves yet another telco: T-Mobile.

Not wanting to screw up anything else with the Overlords of ATT, I didn’t touch the phone after that until my wife got home — at which point I asked her to call the 777-blah-blah-blah number to find out what on earth was going on, and what terrible sin I had committed. She dialed the number, and found herself talking to a very polite, friendly gentleman in the Drop Department (as Dave Barry would say, I’m not making this stuff up!), who said, “This is ATT. I’m George. Who am I talking to?”

My wife gave her name, explained the problem, and was told to wait while he put her on “hold” for a minute. And after a moment’s pause, he returned with the statement, “George is back. I’ve fixed it … temporarily. Don’t ask me how this happened; sometimes it just … happens.”

“Really?” my wife asked. “More than once? We’ve had ATT long-distance service off-and-on for 20 years, on this same number, and we’ve never had anything like this.”

“Well,” said George, “it happens often enough that it’s a full-time job for me.”

He went on to explain that it would take an hour for their computer system to reestablish the existence of our corporate line; but to be really sure that it was reestablished, we should call yet another phone number, tell them we had a “code 775 problem” (again, I’m not making this up), and that we wanted to reestablish ourselves as a “biller.”

My wife waited two hours, just to be sure that the mysterious ATT computer had done its job, and then called the specified number, and found herself talking to a relatively bored, listless woman who (a) had never heard of the Drop Department, (b) had no idea what a “code 775″ problem was, and (c) was absolutely convinced that our corporate phone number did not exist, and had never existed. After a few moments of back-and-forth dialogue (”What’s your account number?” How do I know what my account number is? All I know is my phone number! Isn’t that enough for you people to find our records?”), Ms. Anonymous-Woman said to my wife, “Hold on …” and put her on hold. After ten minutes of silence (no, I’m not making that up either), my wife gave up in disgust, and hung up.

Whereupon we called Verizon, established a long-distance account associated with the corporate phone number that had been serviced by ATT for twenty years, and found that it was also much cheaper than ATT’s service. I fully expect that we’ll be getting an unsolicited phone call from ATT in the very near future, asking us whether we’d be interested in signing up for their corporate long-distance service.

So all I can say at this point is: b-bye, ATT. You obviously don’t remember me, but the past twenty years have been swell …