It’s the phone company. They don’t care, because they don’t have to.
At home, we're switching from @Home Attbi Comcast cable to a DSL line. Yesterday afternoon the DSL provider sent me a note claiming that Qwest was about to bring up the DSL connection and I should call them to finalize the setup.
Well, apparently Qwest was chomping at the bit to do something, so when I didn't call the DSL provider yesterday afternoon (because I was foolishly working for a living) they decided that they'd strike while the iron was hot, and so, sometime between 18:00 and 20:30 last night (we're not sure exactly when, because we'd gone out for school related activities and dinner), they disconnected our phone line.
Um, thanks. It's really useful to not have any connectivity to the outside world except for the computer. Qwest, even though they have a spiffy online support center, doesn't provide online support for telephones (they have one, but when I tried to use it it said "sorry, but we don't provide telephone service to your telephone. Hahahaha!") We used to have a acellphone, but the phone itself went walkabout and we foolishly were using the Working Assets cellphone plan (aka Sprint) which is a lovely plan except that you can't request a SIM card if you lose your phone. Oh, no, it's a plan where you have to help speed the extinction of the lowland gorilla by buying a new phone instead of being able to stuff a new SIM card into a used cellphone (we have four of them lying around, two of which have easily accessable SIM cards [three of them are probably locked, but the fourth, which used to be a T-mobile phone, is now unlocked and can accept any SIM card])
Sigh. Double sigh. It's the telephone company and they hate you.