Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

Remembering the days of long distance past

John I. Carney
4 min readApr 7, 2021

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I was looking at the back of a Listerine bottle this morning and I noticed two telephone numbers for customer service:

The first number is an 888 number, indicated as “toll-free,” and the second is a traditional telephone number in the 215 area code, which users are invited to call collect.

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John I. Carney

Author of “Dislike: Faith and Dialogue in the Age of Social Media,” available at http://www.lakeneuron.com/dislike