The Trouble with MCI

Originally published November 13, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1304

And now, a cautionary tale having nothing to do with comics, but which should be duly noted in the log of “things that could happen to you, so watch it.”

A few months ago, the phone rang in my office (as it is wont to do). I answered it, and there was a representative from MCI on the other end. “Hello, Mr. David,” said the rep. “We’re calling to verify your new MCI calling card.”

I, like most of you out there, get calls from people trying to sell stuff all the time. You know the drill: “You have just been selected to receive: (1) a free subscription to a magazine you never heard of; (2) a free pair of Ginsu knives, (3) a pre-approved Visa card, etc.” (The most irritating was when I would get calls offering me a subscription to Newsday, which I found particularly annoying since I already had one. During one particularly obnoxious round the subscription calls were coming on a weekly basis, and I finally got them to go away by calling the subscription supervisor and threatening to cancel my subscription if I got one more call asking me to subscribe.)

In short, one offer blends into another. Plus, sometimes I’ll get calls from one service outfit or another offering me enrollment in some new plan guaranteed to save me money if only I will spend money that I hadn’t intended to spend in the first place. So I figured that this was simply yet another endeavor to sell me something I didn’t want by acting as if I’d ordered it in the first place.

“I don’t have an MCI calling card,” I explained, “nor did I order one, nor do I want one.”

“Are you sure?” they asked.

“Quite sure, yes.”

“Okay,” they said.

Next day, they called again. And the day after that. There was never any further explanation beyond, “We’re calling to verify your new MCI calling card.” I saw it merely as a fairly irritating sales ploy.

Because sometimes I’m a bit slow, you see. I didn’t realize that someone actually was ordering the cards.

Flash forward to a few weeks later. I got a call from a guy identifying himself as being from the fraud bureau of AT&T. “We’re calling about some unusual activity on your calling card.”

Now, I really do have an AT&T calling card, and there indeed had been some “unusual” activity in that my eldest daughter, Shana, had been out of town for over a month and run up a fairly high bill on the calling card. So I said confidently, “Oh, yes, I knew all about that.”

“So you made all these calls,” he said.

“Well, not me, my daughter, but I know all about it. It’s legit.”

“So she knows people in Egypt?”

I stopped dead. I could feel the color draining from my face. “What?” I said slowly.

“Egypt.” He paused, and then added, “And Yemen.”

“Yemen?!” I squawked. “No! I don’t think anyone in my family even knows where Yemen is! This is on my calling card?”

“Yes, sir. The calling card you ordered in September.”

“I didn’t order a calling card in September! The calling card I’ve got, I’ve had for seven years!”

“Yes, sir, I was afraid of that. Someone ordered a calling card in your name, attached to your phone number.”

I was astounded. Apparently this kind of thing goes on all the time. Not only that, but there’s a sort of worldwide fraudulent phone number ring, with sending and receiving points in Egypt and Yemen (which is why those calls lit up the AT&T security system). The thieves order the false cards (from a payphone) and then, once they’ve got the numbers, contact the switching points in Egypt and Yemen and relay the new numbers to them. The fake numbers are immediately passed along to customers around the world and my phone number starts racking up toll calls.

Usually AT&T reps catch this kind of thing before it actually happens. They run verification procedures. But according to the guy I was speaking with, every so often, a rep gets sloppy, doesn’t do his or her job thoroughly, and a fake card slips through. Then it’s up to the fraud department to catch it before it gets out of control—which this fellow just had done.

“We’ll shut down the account immediately, sir,” he said, apologizing for inconvenience as if he had done anything wrong. I thanked him profusely for doing his job.

That evening my girlfriend, Kathleen, who was out of town, attempted to call me using my usual calling card number, which I had given her for just this purpose. It wouldn’t work. Instead, she got a recording saying the account was unavailable.

AT&T had been too thorough. In addition to shutting down the false account, my legit account had also been blocked. Fortunately enough, the guy at the fraud department had left me his number, and I called him in frustration and explained what had happened. It still took two days to straighten it out, however, as he had to find a way to finesse the computer into putting the correct number back.

Just wait. It gets better. So now we’re into October, and I got a bill from MCI. This struck me as rather odd. I mean, I think Candice Bergen is great and all of that, but I hadn’t switched long distance carriers, although I’d been tempted from time to time because they had some really neat bribes (sorry, “offers”). But I hadn’t made the switch. So I couldn’t figure out what the bill was for.

I cracked the envelope and discovered a bill for $45.

It was for my new MCI calling card. A card for which there were two calls attached.

One to Egypt. The other to Yemen.

“Oh, no,” I moaned softly. (Well, not really—actually I shouted a rather loud profanity that, as Blackadder once said, rhymes with “clucking bell.”)

I immediately called the customer service department for MCI, and hit that joy of the automated age, the automated voice menu. It offered me a series of options and I waded through about four or five until I’d pinpointed it to one that seemed to serve my immediate need. And then I sat. Dead silence on the other end for a couple of minutes. Then a click. Then disconnected.

It gets better yet.

I phoned a second time. This time I employed the stunt I sometimes use to cut through voice menus: I did nothing. When prompted to push a button, I just sat there and listened. When you do this, the voice menu will decide that you either: (a) are one of those rare beings who has a rotary phone, or (b) you don’t comprehend the instructions because you don’t speak English or are just really really stupid. The trick worked. I waited a while, but this time there was Muzak, and finally I got a human being. I explained the situation to him. Unlike the AT&T fraud guy, the MCI customer service guy didn’t seem to have a clue as to what I was talking about. I explained it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y as the guy methodically took down the entire scenario. Then he paused, giving the situation the full and mighty weight of his brain power.

“I can’t help you,” he said finally. “You need to talk to the fraud department.”

Now understand, the first sentence out of my mouth to the guy had been, “Someone fraudulently ordered a calling card using my phone number,” so you’d have thought that—if he couldn’t handle it—that would have tipped him off. “Ooookay,” I said. “Connect me to the fraud department, then.”

“Hold on, sir.”

Click. Muzak. Click. Voice menu. I listened to a series of options, none of which applied remotely to my situation. I tried my non-response ploy. The voice menu repeated. I remained silent. Voice menu kept repeating. “I’m in hell,” I murmured. Finally it put me through to… more Muzak. More waiting.

I got somebody else, told them the situation, told them my phone number. “And you’re saying your didn’t make these calls on your MCI account?” he asked.

“I don’t have an MCI account.”

“Okay. Sorry, sir. For verification purposes, could you tell me the last four digits of your social security number.”

I paused. “I could tell you,” I said, “but I’d be astounded if it matched up. I doubt whoever set it up knows my social security number. Whatever you have is probably fake.”

Like a broken record, he repeated the request. I told him the four digits. He paused and then, as if he’d just caught me at something, informed me, “That’s not what we have on record, sir.”

“Oh, really, Holmes?” I was making no effort to keep the sarcasm from my voice. I’d already wasted fifteen minutes on this. “I told you it wouldn’t match. Now listen: It’s no skin off my nose, because I have no intention of paying for these calls. But while we’re going back and forth, for all I know, someone in Istanbul is calling Sydney and racking up MCI charges. So let’s cancel this account.”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“Why… not…?”

“Because it’s not your account. I can’t even discuss it with you since we can’t verify the social security number.”

I couldn’t believe it. I was flashing back onto that immortal scene from Ruthless People in which the cops were confronted with the idiocy of Bill Pullman’s gloriously dim-bulb character, and one of them mutters, “This may well be the most stupid man alive. Maybe we should shoot him.”

“Of course it’s not my account! It’s a fake! It’s fraudulent! Isn’t this the fraud department?”

“No, sir. This is customer service.”

That stopped me dead. “Then why am I talking to you? The previous guy told me he was connecting me to the fraud department! Silly me. I thought this was, therefore, the fraud department! Now will you please connect me to the fraud department.”

“Hold on.”

Click. Click. Muzak. Brand new voice menu. This one was craftier than the previous one. After I listened to a series of options that didn’t apply, I did nothing. It wouldn’t accept nothing. It just kept repeating the same menu. After four repeats I took a shot at something that sounded like “High Toll Calls.” Seemed reasonable.

More waiting. More Muzak. Got a rep. Explained the entire situation over to him again.

“Hold on, sir.” He went away. More Muzak. He came back. “I can’t help you, sir.”

I could feel myself losing it. “Why. The. Hell. Not? Isn’t this the fraud department?”

“No, sir.”

I didn’t even ask why it wasn’t. “Then put me through to the fraud department.”

“I can’t, sir. But I’ll give you another 800-number you can call.”

“Is that the fraud department?”

“No, sir. It’s customer service. They’re the ones who handle this kind of thing.”

And I blew my stack. “Oh no you don’t!” I bellowed. “I started with customer service forty-five minutes ago. And now you want me to start all over again, calling the same department at another number! Forget it! You want me to speak to this other number? Fine! Then you call it, you tell them what’s going on, you get a supervisor, you get whoever is needed to fix this, and you do it now, or I’m going to call MCI’s lawyers, PR department, president, whoever I can get and tell them about the blinding incompetence that is their customer service department!”

“Hold on, please.”

Click. Click. More Muzak. Click.

“Customer service.”

I wanted to scream. However, I stifled it, because this time it was a woman. Charlene, I believe her name was.

“Charlene,” I said, “I’ve been talking to men for nearly an hour now. You’re a woman. That means you’re smarter. Solve this for me, okay?” I laid it out for her. She checked the records. “The account’s already cancelled,” she said.

“What? When?”

“The end of September.” Of course. That was when I got those calls verifying the MCI card in the first place. Those calls that I’d dismissed as an odd high-pressure sales gimmick had actually been from the elusive MCI fraud department, who’d never identified themselves as such, the way AT&T had.

“But—but if it’s already been cancelled for weeks now, why didn’t any of the people I spoke to earlier tell me that?”

“I have no idea, sir. Hold on,” she said, “while I credit the account. There. All done, sir. You shouldn’t be getting any more bills.”

She had accomplished in precisely one and a half minutes what three earlier customer service reps and over fifty minutes of wasted time had failed to produce: An end to my non-existent account and eradication of the bill.

And the morals of the story are: (1) get an unlisted phone number, (2) always check your phone bills very carefully, and (3) Candice Bergen represents the dumbest organization known to modern telephonics.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., Cairo, Egypt.)