Yesterday, I met a woman who had worked for AT&T back in the 70’s and 80’s before the divestiture of the Bell companies. It was like I was Harry Potter staring into the face of one of Voldemort’s Death Eaters*. For it is a well-established fact in my family that the phone company killed my grandmother.
I dearly loved my maternal grandma. She could be your typical sweet, gray-haired, cookie-baking sort, but she was also fiercely witty, did not suffer fools gladly, and played a mean game of Scrabble.
Despite being older (she had her kids when she was in her 40’s) I remember her as being healthy and energetic, always up for a walk or a shopping trip. She didn’t have any major health issues that I was aware of.
Then the second monthly phone bill arrived.
In 1984, after a decade-long anti-trust battle with the U. S. government, AT&T divested itself of its wholly-owned Bell telephone system. For a while, before the regional Bells and the long-distance companies that emerged from this break up could get their act together, some customers received two bills — one for local service and one for long distance.
One day, as my grandmother sorted through her mail in the dining room, she exclaimed: “But I already paid a phone bill this month!”
My mom explained that she’d be getting two bills from now on.
My grandmother paused, threw the bill down the table, and declared: “Life’s just too complicated to live anymore!”
She died the next year after her health took a dramatic turn and a swift decline.
* - Pardon the popular, contemporary reference, but Harry is my context now. I know there’s probably some classical reference I could have thrown in here, like … oh, I know: “I felt like Inigo Montoya facing the six-fingered man.” There we go!
