SOL: Today's adventures in Telephoneland

Act I: I call Time Warner first. From Will the phone techie, I learn that while Time Warner still has my phone number, it is no longer active. He said that the original request from Credo to port over, i.e., transfer, my number had been canceled when it wasn't completed in time. So Credo will have to request the transfer again. BUT a transfer can only be made of an active number. So I have to reactivate my phone account with Time Warner, and that itself takes about 20 minutes because the customer service person sort of insisted on finding me the best-priced bundle, and then she has to send me through a "third-party" recording to verify that I'm who I say I am, am authorized to change my plan with Time Warner, and lots more questions.

Act II: I call Credo, where I get yet another techie, named Kenny. I tell him that Credo has to resubmit its request to port over the number. He tells me that Time Warner had called Credo earlier in the day (before my call to Time Warner chronicled above) to ask, "Why are you billing this number when the number belongs to Time Warner?" When told that Credo had been asked to port over the number, Time Warner says, "Expire the request, the customer wants to stay with Time Warner." This is BEFORE I had called Time Warner today. Just want to make that clear. And I do not want to stay with Time Warner

Intermission: I have lunch with Susan and Dozie at Sookk, a nice Thai place on Broadway.

Act III: In my e-mail after lunch is one from Time Warner "confirming" a service visit on Thursday about a digital phone. I have no idea what this is about, but it's a good thing I call to ask, because then I learn that while the woman I talked to at Time Warner earlier in the day had reactivated my phone number, the reactivation won't be final until Thursday. So Credo cannot submit a request to port over my number until at least Thursday. The service call was to connect my phone, but since all I need is to see the phone light on the modem light up, I won't need a service call for that. (So this guy says.)

Act IV: I call Credo again to report that they can't submit a request for porting over the number until it is really a live number on my end. Justin, the techie on this call, tells me my problem is rare; he has only seen it once before. He also has an ingenious theory about what happened: when the porting over looked done, Time Warner immediately released my number, but in fact the porting over wasn't done. So when Time Warner saw that it wasn't complete, it took back the number, but then the number existed in both places, which isn't supposed to happen. So Justin thinks the number got stuck in a recurring loop in which the porting over starts, Time Warner cuts out, then takes back the number when it sees the porting over hasn't completed. AND when I first asked to have my number transferred, I was supposed to have been assigned a temp number, so that when my number was ported in to Credo, it would replace the temp number. Now I have been assigned a temp number, which I don't want to use because I don't want anyone to think that this is my number.

Epilogue: I am waiting for the phone icon to light up on Time Warner's modem -- hopefully this will happen on Thursday -- and then I will call Credo and start this porting process all over again. Will it work this time? your favorite cliche.