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Nothing much is likely to be resolved in the next few weeks or even months. In the Northeast, customers will be getting bills this week that will average nine pages and include statements for local service, various kinds of long-distance tolls, and equipment charges. Countless users have convinced themselves that they have to do something with their phones now that divestiture has taken place. Not true, as AT&T is pointing out in an expensive TV advertising campaign featuring Andy Griffith. Customers can continue to rent their phones as they did before the split-up, they can buy the Bell phones they have been using, or they can turn them in and buy new ones, either from AT&T Information Systems or from any of several new suppliers.
Not many consumers seemed to realize that. In Chicago, a few days before divestiture, long lines formed at the Illinois Bell Telephone service center in the Loop as customers rushed to turn in telephones and exchange them for others before Illinois Bell went out of the telephone-supply business. "What a mess!" declared Margaret Jackson, one of five harried clerks wearing a T shirt imprinted with BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO. She tossed a pink Princess phone onto a growing, brightly colored pile of discarded equipment behind the service desk. Said she of the long line of short-tempered customers glowering at her: "I really feel for them. So many of them don't know what is going on." The scene was the same in Atlanta, where Service Representative Muffin Morrison said, "People are panicking."
Inside the operating companies, bizarre developments were taking place. Phone-company officials in some old Bell System facilities set up barriers to separate operating-company employees from those working for the new AT&T. In West Chicago, AT&T must now share a third of its space in a sprawling plant with Ameritech, the regional holding company for five Midwestern states. A partition is being installed between double doors at the building's main entrance, and the plan is to have employees enter on either the Ameritech or the AT&T side. Inside, about 450 people have been separated by walls, including one in the cafeteria. No one is forbidden to cross over to fraternize, but the implicit message is "Keep to your own turf." Said James Quinlan, Ameritech's plant manager: "If the lawyers had their way, this place would be divided up with six-foot concrete-block walls and rolls of barbed wire on the top." New Jersey Bell is more direct: it has canceled its annual softball game with AT&T.
The segregation was in line with both the letter and the spirit of the divestiture terms agreed to by AT&T and the Government. U.S. Judge Harold H. Greene during the past two years has overseen all details of the split-up, issuing numerous rulings affecting everything from Yellow Pages advertising to who could use the Bell logo and name.