Last Updated on April 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
I’ve heard horror stories about Worldcom before, but never experienced them firsthand–to my knowledge. Until now.
Then I noticed yesterday that MCI (a division of Worldcom–they’re distancing themselves from the name now) has been charging me for long-distance service at my apartment. I vacated my apartment several months ago. I switched long-distance providers from MCI months before that. Like August. I waited on hold nearly half an hour before I got to talk to a customer service rep, who refused to do anything about it. I told her I’d call Discover and have them dispute the charges. “Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”
“Obviously not,” I said. I called Discover. Within five minutes, they’d begun the dispute process and credited my account.
Now I understand Worldcom’s plan for making money.
“In order to better serve our shareholders, we have scaled back our customer service operations in order to concentrate on billing our former customers for services not rendered…”
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
The only phone company I have ever gotten unsolicited calls from is MCI. They called me for about two weeks straight at about 8:30 AM every morning. After I cussed the lady out after two weeks, (it was the same one who called every morning) I’ve never recieved a call or piece of mail from them.
MCI has tried for years to charge us for one month of WorldCom internet service. I have no idea what’s up with that. They claim they provided us with a month of internet service before we even got a computer! How ridiculous. They tried to get us to switch to them for years, even offering bonus checks. My mother always took them, unfortunately. We changed long distance companies so often, I lost track of them. I’d have my mother coming in screaming at me for a couple hour phone call one Saturday to a friend in California that ended up costing 25 cents a minute. Of course, I wouldn’t have stayed on the phone that long if I’d known we were on MCI again. But, that’s beside the point.
We ended up getting cell phones (to avoid telemarketers, in fact) with nation-wide long distance in their plans, and when we moved in November, we decided not to keep long distance on our house phone. MCI calls us all the time, and they introduce themselves as “your long distance provider.” My response, since of course it’s my job to answer mystery phone calls, is always “We don’t have long distance here.” The telemarketer apologizes and hangs up. Next time I pick up the house phone and it’s MCI, I will be a little less nice.