I've always admired the way phone companies charge a monthly fee for people not to be listed in a phone book. I mean, talk about chutzpah -- charging customers to not receive a service they didn't even ask for in the first place.
But Time Warner Cable takes the cake. The company charges 99 cents a month for its telephone customers to not be listed in a directory that the company doesn't even publish.
Time Warner outsources the entire operation. It relies on Sprint to pull together all its customers' names and numbers, and to then pass them along to whichever phone giant dominates a particular area -- typically AT&T or Verizon.
The Time Warner Cable customers are then listed alongside AT&T's or Verizon's customers in that company's phone book.
Think of that: Time Warner hires rival telecom companies to provide this service, which undoubtedly represents a significant financial commitment on Time Warner's part.
But if a customer chooses not to burden the company with inclusion in another company's directory, he or she gets smacked with nearly $12 a year in additional fees.
I bring this up because Time Warner Cable has just notified about 70,000 Southern California customers that the company neglected to charge them for the privilege of not being listed in the phone book of a competing service provider.
Time Warner says customers desiring unlisted numbers now have 30 days in which to make their preference known. Otherwise, the monthly fee will kick in.
“We periodically conduct audits to make sure customers are being billed correctly," said Patricia Fregoso-Cox, a Time Warner spokeswoman. “In this case, we determined that we'd made a mistake by not billing people."
To the company's credit, it's not shaking people down for past payments. But what's the deal with the recurring nature of the unlisted-number fee?
I mean, this is the computer age. Companies maintain databases. If a customer expresses a particular preference -- to have his or her phone number unlisted, say -- you enter a few keystrokes and, boom, problem solved.
Why would you get billed again for this every few weeks?
“There's a processing fee to keep people unlisted," Fregoso-Cox replied.
What kind of process beyond the initial change to the database?
“I'm not sure. But there's a process to keep people out of the listings."
She added: “In the years I've had an unlisted number, I've never questioned it. And our customers have never questioned it, as far as I know."
Be that as it may, Time Warner Cable isn't alone in levying this fee. AT&T charges its customers $1.25 monthly for an unlisted number. Verizon charges $1.75.
Jon Davies, a Verizon spokesman, said that “there are a lot of costs" associated with not publishing a number in a telephone directory, although he couldn't say what they were.
“There are ongoing processes that we have to observe," he said.
