Phone Operators Play Numbers Game
Question: Why can you get an address (along with a telephone number) from one city’s information number but not from another’s?
Washington gave me the address I wanted without any question, but the information operator in St. Petersburg, Fla., would not. Thinking the policy might change from operator to operator, I tried St. Petersburg a second time but was informed that “we are not allowed to give out addresses.”
Instead, she gave me a long-distance number (not toll free), which she said was “GTE’s name and address headquarters.” I called that number and was given the address and ZIP code promptly, but I assume that there was probably a charge for it in addition to the long-distance call that I had to make to get it. What is the charge for this sort of thing, and how come the need for it varies from city to city?--R.R.
Answer: Nothing in the telephone business has really been simple since the court broke up Ma Bell’s benign monopoly back in ’84. For about 100 years there had been, in general, one policy on all telephone matters. Guess whose?
Now, however, we have differing policies coming out of our ears. Not differences between the three major long-distance carriers but between every local telephone jurisdiction in the country.
While the three biggies in long-distance service are AT&T;, MCI and GTE-Sprint--which together have about 90% of the business (the rest is split up among perhaps seven or eight small carriers)--AT&T; is still top dog with about 70% of the gross. Local directory assistance, however, is strictly a hometown matter.
The oddity in your situation, according to Jeff Davis of AT&T;’s public relations staff, is that when you dialed for long-distance directory assistance (the area code plus 555-1212), you automatically went through AT&T;’s network (neither MCI nor GTE-Sprint has long-distance directory assistance). AT&T;’s operator, however, then switches your inquiry over to the local telephone company--and that puts you at the mercy of the local telephone company’s policy on providing, or not providing, addresses to matching telephone numbers.
And this explains the bafflement of local representatives of both AT&T; and GTE as to how in calling Florida you ended up being referred to “GTE’s name and address headquarters” by, presumably, an AT&T; long-distance operator. It’s an organization completely unknown to local GTE people.
After a number of transcontinental calls trying to track this mystery down, what we have is an unusual situation where--at least in Florida and in possibly one or two other areas--AT&T; and GTE have a contractual arrangement under which GTE handles directory assistance for the entire state no matter in whose area the number is actually located.
And, locally at least, GTE has a policy of providing the address if the caller presses for it and, presumably, it’s the same policy pursued by the mysterious “GTE name and address headquarters.”
But because policies like this are, normally, purely a local determination, we can only fall back on conjecture in your case: that the first time you called you ran up against a local prohibition against giving out addresses, but when you called that special number, you ran into a more liberal policy of doing just the opposite.
The cost? No one in either AT&T; or GTE seems to know. The standard AT&T; charge for long-distance directory assistance is a flat 50 cents--on top of which you will, of course, be billed for the long-distance call to GTE.
But the further oddity in all this is that the cooperative agreement in Florida between GTE and AT&T; is supposed to be strictly for in-state directory assistance.
How you --calling from California--fell into what is supposed to be a purely in-Florida arrangement baffles everyone.
