Phone phollies

I picked up the telephone last night to place a couple calls, and:

We're sorry. The number you are calling from has been disconnected. For assistance, please call your customer service center.

It took a little experimenting to establish that I could still place local calls, but direct-dial long distance was gone. I was further dismayed when an 800-number didn't go through on the first try (subsequent attempts succeeded).

So what's up? I logged in to my local telephone provider's website, and they still showed "Worldcom" as my long distance connection. Note though that this is not who I pay my bills to. Worldcom merely owns the connections that my long-distance provider leases in order to provide service to people like me. My long distance is (was) provided by GTC Telecom. I logged in to their website that provides my billing information and found no special notices or alerts. I did find though that they have billed me for no calls whatsoever since August 2nd. Mysterious. I sent GTC Telecom a detailed email describing my problem and situation, for which I have yet to see any response.

Today, however, I spotted on their primary web page a notice that "We have changed our underlying carrier to Sprint." Well, good heavens, that could explain a lot.

This change should be invisible to you and your service should not have been interrupted.

That's where they are wrong. See, my local telephone provider gives us the option of blocking switches of long-distance provider unless the order is given by the customer personally (the "anti-slamming" protection). So if GTC Telecom told my local carrier to switch me (their customer) from Worldcom to Sprint, my local carrier would ignore that. The big mistake on GTC Telecom's part is not notifying me in any way. While it's possible they may have tried to email, it is equally possible that my internet provider's spam filtering ate their lousy notice. Something this important should have been snail-mailed, or at least heralded in my online invoices. They did neither.

Presently, I'm a little miffed at not being notified of this action, and even more miffed that GTC Telecom still hasn't responded to my rather elementary email given eighteen hours already. I'm used to small operations like this being short service-wise, but we're talking email instead of personal service, and I can't even get that? To their credit, GTC Telecom says they'll credit me if my local phone provider dings me for the switch to Sprint (seven dollars and eighty cents, it turns out), and they give contact info and instructions for achieving that. But this is immaterial until I get my service back. The GTC Telecom number alternates between being busy and just not answering. I can hope that now, after switching the long distance carrier lines to Sprint, everything might magically fall together on its own -- but that seems iffy.

Please, no taunting from those of you who have discarded your land-lines altogether.