DIRECTORY RESISTANCE

Des Moines, Iowa, is missing. So are Deming, N.M., the Albuquerque police department, the New York Stock Exchange, the Dallas Cowboys and countless ordinary folk. An alien plot? Close. The once simple act of obtaining long-distance information has become the latest casualty of deregulation. These days a call for out-of-state information not only gets you way out of state–not the one you think you’re dialing–but often doesn’t get you any information either. The misinformation is the result of a spitting contest between AT&T and the local phone companies, as they begin to compete head to head.

Call New York information from Houston, for example, and ask for the New York Stock Exchange. No listing. Nope. Or call Dallas–Irving, to be precise, home of the Dallas Cowboys–and ask for the number of Da’Boys. No listing. You provide the address–1 Cowboys Parkway–and are finally given a number, which produces only the screech of the no-such-number signal. The list goes on: no number for state representatives’ offices in New England, or for the Mayflower hotel in Washington, D.C. One operator, when asked for a number in Des Moines, informed the caller that there was no such place.

What is going on here? In a word: deregulation. The seminal event in the deterioration of long-distance information occurred two years ago, when AT&T got into the business of providing its own long-distance directory-assistance service rather than connecting its customers to Alice or Joe at the local phone company, with whom AT&T used to have an agreement.

Now, as AT&T competes with its former children, some of the regional operating companies, a.k.a. the Baby Bells, are no longer sharing their database of phone numbers with Ma Bell. The upshot is that AT&T has assembled replacement services consisting of one subcontractor, Excell Agent Services in Phoenix, Ariz.; two of its own regional centers; and a few stray agreements with Baby Bells. Thus when you’re in, say, Oregon calling to find a Florida number, your long-distance information operator is now likely to be in Phoenix; Scranton, Pa.; or Augusta, Ga. (MCI and Sprint still have agreements with the Bells–but that could change too once they start competing locally.)

Meanwhile, AT&T is doing everything from teaching geography to operators (hint: Des Moines is in Iowa) to routing New York City calls to a specific set of operators who might have heard of the stock exchange or Grand Central Terminal. “We are cleaning it up,” says AT&T spokeswoman Pat Mallon. She cites Silicon Valley and Long Island as recent successes, but problems still exist in some vital areas like Washington, because the city covers three area codes and its information systems don’t “talk” to one another. There’s still some work to be done. Earlier this year, a request for Squaw Valley, the famous ski resort in California where the 1960 Winter Olympics were held, produced incorrect numbers from all over the region. One operator finally got close, providing a number for the Olympic Village–something that has not existed for 30 years.

–With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin and Aixa M. Pascual/New York