Earlier in the week, my wife asked me to look up a phone number online for her. Our new neighbors across the street have a new-born baby and she wanted to call for permission to come over to see (and hold, I'm sure) the little one. My wife is a heavily credentialed "Grammy," but all of her grand kids are well out of the cuddling stage.

So I tried to find the phone number without resorting to 411 for which there used to be a $.50 charge. I first tried the "Official AT&T Site" white pages for a free look-up. Not so fast, I found out. All sorts of information concerning the person whose name/address that you entered was available. Just about everything except for the person's credit score was within their reach. But, they did not give me a phone number!

You were required to go through a credit card, 30-day trial period, etc. The number of hits that I got from googling "free phone numbers" was impressive. Many of the listings were duplicates. It is frustrating to try to get to speak to a person these days without going through multiple menus. AT&T needs to hire rather than layoff operators, "AT&T announces layoffs of 71 operators statewide," (Nov. 28).