my worst phone company experience - the 'drop' (MySpace 5/23/2008)

Subject	my worst phone company experience - the 'drop'
DateCreated	5/23/2008 7:45:00 PM
PostedDate	5/23/2008 6:43:00 PM
Body	Today, while doing a Google search re. my cell phone, I serendipitously encountered a forum thread titled, "Your worst phone company experience" - a chain of little personal stories-from-hell. I didn't stay there long, but it brought to mind an experience from long ago. I was living in a house in East Oakland - one phone and several roomates. One day, just before hanging up the phone - my other party had already hung up - I heard some giggling. Strange. Somebody else was on the line. A bit later, outside the house, I noticed that there was a phone linemen up on a pole next to the house. I called up to him about the giggling. He asked my number and said he'd check it out. Back outside a few minutes later, he looked down at me and said, "You've got a 'drop'". What? He said it was likely that the last location to have our phone number was still connected to our line. Did we still have our old phone bills? "If I were you, I'd check all your bills and ask the phone company for a refund for any numbers you don't recognize. And don't tell them I said that." I located the old bills, 6-8 months worth, passed them around the roommates - and sure enough, we'd been billed for a lot of odd calls. So I called up the phone company, and told the rep. - let's call her "Mrs. Beasley" - that we had another party connected to our phone line. No, that was not possible, since we had a private line. And the giggling meant that someone was on an extension - though I told her we had no extensions. And the strange calls were ones we'd forgotten we'd made. Then I added that a lineman had told me there was another connection. "A telephone company employee told you that?" Different tune. She'd have someone look into it and get she'd get back to me. But she didn't. A week later, I called back.  Mrs. Beasley said they'd checked it out, and nothing was wrong. She made it sound like she thought I'd been trying to pull a fast one. A few days later, during a phone conversation, I heard some whispering in the background. Hell!  I rang up the phone company, determined to demand that they immediately send an inspector. But Mrs. Beasley was out for the day.  The rep. I was talking to asked if she could help instead. Oh, damn - I'd have to start over from the beginning! But I agreed, and gave her my name and number. Instantly, she said, "Oh! You're the gentleman with the 'drop'!" She told me they were going to refund everything we were asking for. For some time afterwards, I'd occasionally recall this incident with the phone company, and wonder about "Mrs. Beasley's" part in it, and how it turned out for her.