-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- gburnore@netcom.com (Gary L. Burnore) wrote:
:> :Actually in the case of anonymous e-mail you have one additional :> :safeguard. You can ask to be blocked from receiving anonymous e-mail. Try :> :telling the telephone company that you want to be blocked from receiving :> :calls from any pay phone! :> :> It's available now. The first to use it are pager companies. : :Why would a pager company want to block calls from pay phones?
Because they (the pager companies) have been ordered to pay the charges related to calls made to their service from pay phones. 18.5 cents per call was the number the fed agreed to. Keeping up with the telecommunications industry is difficult, eh?
First of all, I was not aware that Politas was running a pager company when I suggested that it might be difficult for HIM to ask the telephone company to block all calls from pagers. Presumably an individual would have a lot less clout in such situations than a high volume customer such as a paging company might have. Second, as you can probably tell from his return address, Politas is located in Australia, where different rules apply. Third, I doubt that the telecommunications industry is any more difficult to keep up with than any other industry, provided you have some need to do so. Of the thousands of industries out there, telecommunications is not one that I follow intensely.
: Haven't :you seen that commercial (for MCI?) where the kids crowd into that phone :booth and page someone to pick them up from school before the big :storm hits?
Yeah, corny commercial.
: Imagine if they had gotten a recording saying "I'm sorry. :You can't page this number from a pay phone." Really bad PR!
Just as bad as the PR when you tell everyone your new 800 pager number and tell them "But you have to call from a real phone not a pay phone" and then explain why a pay phone isn't a "real phone".
Just don't sign up for pager service with a company that blocks calls from pay phones, then. Then you don't have to try to re-educate everyone whenever the definition of "real phone" changes. Let the pager companies pass along the surcharge to customers who choose to be pager-accessible from pay phones. I figure if an extra 18.5 cents is going to make that much of a difference to me, I probably didn't want to talk to that person that badly, anyway. So I'd either opt to not pay extra for 800 access, and let people page me at their own expense, or else be more selective who I gave my toll-free access number to. I have a friend who has basic pager service with a local, non-toll-free access number. He also has separate 800 service that rings through to his pager number. The more expensive 800 number is given out more selectively than the local number. - --- Finger <comsec@nym.alias.net> for PGP public key (Key ID=19BE8B0D) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i Charset: noconv iQEVAwUBNJ1utgbp0h8ZvosNAQHo8Af/QnNTrhrTvwiBSKLx7QNHuXMglG8U2Q5P 5dEXqFEXLFLKGK/bt/Udh6702z2maWqFv/Gw9tCASXJkhzaphpOgc5uuAm/pCvPa X6BaQ5QyQMb2rc3sBkCeGqJyggzkVbI3Cel5eB5tvoQuDvqEJcIc56DyvfZxZBJF /Muq2Sy4iALkk92n3CQcck6Yb0IpZukVGoq0lRfkb8DnawOIbSXHKm4RSmEctQGI CCfkJcm/4zzxBippMEeLYJIEJN/QdsIrsvtw4RPfsse8urTjluY/V/DPUoUMDht/ EagfEeLYrf3zAKzarpeH3UIPyrNNk9Z6Js+KINV1zOhCAO97SPJ+mw== =lVC8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----