More Catch-22 From the Phone Company

I had the same horrid experience with the phone company as Richard Jacobson (“Move, Then Just Try to Get Phone Service,” Getting Answers, May 8), but with GTE (instead of Pac Bell)--the failure to hook up the phone on schedule, the stonewalling from indifferent employees and the same silly excuse: the weather.

I moved into a condo building with no resident manager. The only way to know that someone was at the front gate was when they rang up on the intercom--which, of course, is connected to the telephone. Without a phone, I had no intercom. I tried to explain this to one “customer service” flunkie after another when they insisted that the best they could offer me in the way of an “appointment” was the same four-hour window that Jacobson wrote about. Finally, in desperation, I asked one GTE employee: “Does that mean that I or my husband have to stand out in the street to wait for GTE for up to four hours?” Her answer: “I’m afraid so.”

Lily Tomlin, in her incarnation as Ernestine the telephone operator, put it best: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

NORRA MACREADY, Huntington Beach