CONNECTING TO THE PHONE
 COMPANY
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, August 13, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: Column 
 ( Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver
 Rocky Mountain News in Colorado.)

It's Osborn, no 'e'

 I was going to start this column "So you think you have
 problems with U S West?" and then tell you about mine.
 It's a timely subject here, because the company will soon
 be facing hearings before the Colorado Public Utilities
 Commission about its unsatisfactory service.

 But when I called the company's Media Relations
 Department last week, Anna Osborne was so nice and so
 efficient that I want to say up front that if you get to the
 right person, previously intractable difficulties seem to
 vanish.

 Of course, as my son Peter in St. Paul, Minn., has
 discovered, it can sometimes be fiendishly difficult to get
 to the right person. He runs a small Internet service, and
 when he calls for repairs, which unfortunately he has had
 to do frequently, he gets a different story from everyone
 he talks to and it often takes several tries before he finds
 someone who can actually fix the line. This upsets him,
 because his customers start canceling their accounts
 when his phone lines don't work.

 My difficulties began in January, when I started receiving
 puzzling calls from people all over the Western United
 States who had been getting nuisance calls at home and
 were expecting me to know what to do about it. At first I
 thought it was a prank, but they were obviously in
 earnest, some of them in fact distraught, and furthermore
 not at all happy to find out they had made a long-distance
 call to a newspaper in Denver instead of to someone who
 could help them.

 Some days there were three or four calls like that, and
 eventually I was able to get one of the callers to tell me
 that he got my number from U S West itself. He had
 called the company's 800 number for reporting harassing,
 obscene or threatening calls it's 1-800-541-3386, and if
 you're a customer I suggest you write it down, because U
 S West has helpfully eliminated it from the most recent
 directory I have.

 So I called the number, too, hoping I could at least find
 out what the correct number was if I couldn't get them to
 stop giving out mine. No soap. The representative I
 talked to wouldn't even listen to me until she knew the
 number I was calling from, and then when I gave it to
 her, kept insisting she couldn't help me because I was
 calling from a business line, and her office handled only
 harassing calls to residences. I asked to speak to a
 supervisor, and the line went dead.

 I wouldn't like to claim she hung up on me, because
 telephone transfers do sometimes go astray, but the
 timing is suspicious. Certainly no one called me back. I
 also tried calling the customer response line, but that call
 wasn't returned either.

 Osborne listened sympathetically and promised she
 would find out where the problem was, and call me back
 promptly with an explanation. And so she did. The 800
 number belongs to U S West's Annoyance Call Bureau,
 which receives 2,000 to 2,400 calls a day about nuisance
 calls of all kinds. Some are deliberate harassment, but
 others are mix-ups like a mindless fax machine on
 automatic redial or particularly disagreeable
 telemarketers. Bureau operators route the calls to
 appropriate places and as I suspected, someone there had
 my number written down instead of the correct one for
 "security response," which helps law enforcement
 agencies track down addresses from telephone numbers.

 Osborne said it would not happen again, and I bet it
 won't. But if it does, at least I can tell people where they
 should be calling.

 Peter has encountered the same disconnect between
 residential and business service. He has multiple lines all
 accessible from the same number, which is called a "hunt
 group."

 The residential office tells him only the business office
 can handle service requests involving hunt groups, and
 transfers him, and the business office tells him only the
 residential office can handle service requests from a
 residence, and transfers him back.

 And that's not to mention the time his service complaint
 was transferred to a mortgage-approval hotline, or when
 they wired his fax line into the Internet hunt group, or
 assigned his phone number simultaneously to another
 customer, or said they couldn't fix the static on his line
 because his dog was too aggressive, only he doesn't have
 a dog.

 Osborne called Peter, too, and now he has names and
 phone numbers of people he can call if he has further
 problems.

 I'm personally glad U S West takes media relations
 seriously. Would that they worried as much about
 ordinary-customer relations.