sundance-communications.com Forums Member Forums Phone Booth Leased Rotary Phones

The nice old lady of 93 years called me up today to replace her rotary dial wall phone that was sent as a replacement from AT&T. Get this, she had been renting a phone since they invented them. I asked her why she was still renting it. She said, I have had this Kitchen wall phone for 40 years. What was I going to say to her? I could only think how much anuity that phone made AT&T of this one phone. That Kitchen wall phone cost her 3000.00 or more. This is One of the most exspensive wall phones I seen yet.

Lets see...3000.00 x 20,000 old folks who know no better = 60 million dollars for an initial 5 thousand in equipment (that's just a guess)
All I can say...is WoW

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| Need a Telephone | Telephone Installers

There was an article in the paper about this not to long ago actually. There are a lot of people that still do this. It brings AT&T close to a million a year. I do contract work for one of the companies that AT&T outsources this work to and have done tons of work for them here in Ohio.

Do the lady a favor. Look at her phone bill see if she was being billed for the phone. If she was put in a request for a refund. GTE had to do this like 10 years ago here in FL. Public service comm ruled if they wanted a rate increase they had to refund on all rent above a %.

Talk about old, Until about 10 years ago my grandmother's home phone was on a "party line". (You young techs. may not get this!)

I have a really good phone rental story! About fifteen+ years ago, we were hired by a condiminium complex to remove secretarial sets (a two line phone that has a regular line and then an internal intercom path to the front desk) in 400 apartments. All we had to do was to remove the phone and install an RJ14 for a two-line phone.

We didn't charge much, less than $20.00 per apartment, but our service included returning the key set (yes, these phones were considered KEY equipment because of the turn knob) to AT&T. Most of them weren't even being used any more and simply collecting dust behind a sofa. We did this removal in bulk; literally crates of phones at a time. When we turned them in, we soon realized that customers had been paying between $5.00 and $12.00 PER MONTH for rental. Of course, the cost depended upon the color and dial mode. Pink ones, blue ones, green ones, panel phones, you name it; we had them. One customer had been paying $0.35 per month extra for a 14 foot cord on the phone since 1973.

One very attentive AT&T representative made mention of the fact that this type of "PBX" equipment was no longer supported by the company and therefore not eligible for monthly billing. Needless to say, we jumped all over that. Too bad she didn't receive anything for knowing her job. I can only imagine what happened to her. My guess is that it was probably not good since I never saw her again.

The long and short of it was that we managed to negotiate refunds to 400+ customers for at least five year's worth of rental fees for these sets. We didn't even push very hard! AT&T was happy to do it so they could rid themselves of further involvement with this equipment. I can't say that I blame them; it was a maintenance nightmare with cord boards, solder frames, etc.

Not only did we get paid for the job; the complex paid us an additional bonus for our honesty; and the best parts were numerous gifts from the customers like cakes, pies, cookies and thank you notes from little old ladies who didn't even know what they had been paying for!

The money was nice, the bonus was better, but to put a smile on a 90 year-old woman's face by just doing our job was the best payment!

[This message has been edited by ev607797 (edited April 19, 2005).]

What comes to mind what is even worse than a rental phone is that the Bell companies used to charge 50 cents a month to light your pincess phone light with a cube 18 volt power supply pluged into an outlet that you paid the electric co for. How many times have you found one of these babies still pluged in when you needed the Blk, YL pair for a second line? Oh, and those party lines and set conversion for ring ident and tip ident, All for billing purposes...? what a rip off.

Watch out for those power cubes! I can't remember how many years it's been, probably 20 or so, but Bell sent out a recall on them because they overheated and caused fires.

The last I heard about recalls of the 2012 Trimline dial light transformers was in the late '70's when an New Jersey Bell installer was connecting service at our house. He told me he was instructed to inspect the entire house for transformers manufactured by Ault, Inc. since they were the ones that supposedly had the problems. I never heard anything after that even after relocating to another Bell territory and having installers out. Were there other recalls that I missed?

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Ed
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How come there's always enough time to go back and fix it a second time?