..	Rodney Allen Rippy

He says the AT&T customer representative never told him what an AT&T spokesman emphasized to me this past week: This was absolutely the most expensive way to make calls.  So Lauren ran up charges for 1,996 minutes of "AT&T calls made with a non-AT&T card", totaling $2,900.10 on Nino's July and August bills.  Lengthy calls were billed at about $1 a minute and one-minute calls cost him $5.88 each.

Lauren was on the telephone more than five hours a day during this period---much of the time because of a romantic relationship, sometimes to call home.  Nino has pleaded with various AT&T service reps to agree to "re-rate" all of his daughter's calls at 25¢ a minute, claiming he was misled about their cost.

I examined the issue by talking with Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T at its headquarters in Basking Ridge, N.J.; with Edward Ticktin, a thousand Oaks telephone agent whose expertise I respect; and with John Britton, chief California spokesman for PacBell as well as Nino and his daughter.

Siegel insisted, and Ticktin agreed, that the initial AT&T agent rep was behaving legally in not telling Nino that the cost of Lauren's calls would be prohibitive.  But between legality and advisability of particular conduct, there is often a big difference.
Ticktin said of Nino: "he was naive to assume that because he was a 30-year AT&T customer that AT&T would be his friend.  "Did they have any obligation to give him their least expensive rate? Probably not.  Should they have told him this was a bad idea? Probably, "they should have."

Nino said, at one point, "We called PacBell to cancel our old calling card and have them issue us a new one....The PacBell representative informed us that our problems with AT&T, while extreme, were not unique....that AT&T's procedures require that their personnel not offer reduced charge plans unless there is a specific request for that particular plan.

PacBell spokesman Britton questioned whether it was appropriate for the PacBell rep to make such statements about AT&T, a competitor.  But Britten added, "People need to be absolutely careful these days in using calling cards.  It used to be, you could place calls by accessing a long distance carrier and have them charged to your PacBell calling card without excess charges.  That is no longer the case.  Now you often pay $4.99 right away, and 89¢ more per minute.
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