Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for November 13, 2009

Ah, Customer Service from the phone company! Good luck with your herring order, Opus!

Usually they want to look up the number for you, charge you a big fat fee to do that and another big fat fee to connect you to the number. All their big fat fees goes a long way to explain why so many people don’t have land line anymore.

Sounds like Ernestine from the old Rowan and Martin Laugh-In show.

Opus needs a herring aid.

I bet the operator works for scale.

my thoughts , too, Ravenna AL—-

“…one ringy dingy, two ringy dingy ….oh, gracious good afternoon mister veedle!”

“Have I reached the person to whom I am speaking?”

I miss Laugh-In!

Ernestine: “We don’t care, we don’t have to – we’re the phone company!”

Press one for English, mush-for-brains.

Ah, the sainted Lily Tomlin; we need to preserve all the video of her gigs. The Phone Company (if you hadn’t noticed) is getting back together, like something out of a horror-slime movie. Cutting it up didn’t help, either.

Indians may not be easy to understand, but at least they’re polite, respectful, and seem to care about trying to solve your problem.

pbarnrob: The problem was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as far as I’m concerned - that opened the closed doors to re-organization and acquisition. Southwestern Bell, in Texas, as I recall, became a holding company, SBC, which then purchased Pacific Telesis, Southern New England, and then Ameritech. It also has more companies in central and southern states. It then bought the old AT&T so it could now call itself “AT&T”, but of course the Bell System AT&T is long gone - it is just SBC with a new name. They are as consumer-friendly as the credit card companies are. You might remember that the Bell System break-up was to eliminate this sort of large monopoly - what in the world would make congress decide to gut these provisions? $$$$$.

It’s funny how the easier and faster it gets to look up phone numbers, the more information charges to do it for you.

Sure made a market niche for 411.org and their ilk!

There were a few other oopses in the ’90s, when they had Bill C. on the hot-seat over the stain on a dress, like the repeal of Glass-Steagall which had kept banks and investment companies apart since the ’30s, and has led to the rampant malfeasance that’s killing our current banks (more closed today).