My husband and I recently came to the conclusion that we were crazy to be paying $40 a month for regular (landline) telephone service when we hardly ever use it because we have come to rely so heavily on our cell phones. To the twenty-somethings, this is no big deal. But to those of us in the older generation, getting rid of the telephone service that we have had all our lives is a major move.

Also, we have had the same landline telephone number for more than 15 years. What if some old friend wants to reach us? We didn’t want to give up our number.

Luckily we didn’t have to. You can now keep your landline number and move it to a cell phone — it’s called “porting” the number over. Unfortunately, the process was not as smooth as it should be.

First we made the arrangements with AT&T, our cell phone carrier. According to the AT&T agent, she would handle everything and within a few hours, the number would be moved to our cell phone. Ah! If only it were so. Several days later when it became apparent that the move was not made, I called AT&T again and I was told that the request had not been entered or at least had not been entered properly. I went through the entire scenario again. This time I was told that the move would take “a few” days.

Wanting to be sure that everything was handled properly the second time, I went over to the AT&T store. At the store they said everything had been done correctly and the number would be working properly within a few hours. No such luck!!

We went away for the weekend assuming that the number would be ported over while we were gone. We came back to a message from AT&T saying the the completion of the porting would not happen until July 10th — a full two weeks after we made the initial request. I hope that it will happen then, but there is certainly no guarantee.

AT&T says that Embarq (our local carrier) is sitting on the number for as long as they can… of course, the longer they keep the number the longer they can charge us for it! Embarq says this is not true, that AT&T is at fault. I think they are both at fault. Embarq certainly could have released the number sooner. Why should it take so long? It is also apparent that no one at AT&T knows how this works or knows how long it should take. I got contradictory information from each of the 4 agents I talked to at AT&T.

The idea of being able to keep my old telephone number is a good one. Now if only the landline folks were forced to perform more quickly and the cellular folks would train their employees properly, it could be a good experience.

It’s not over yet. Oh, Oh! Maybe I shouldn’t have written this so soon. If someone from Embarq reads this, they may sit on my number even longer! I’ll let you know.

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