I receive quite a bit of e-mail from this site. Most of the messages offer words of praise while others ask for help. Every once in awhile I will receive a note that says, “Don’t you have anything better to do??” or “What a waste of time…”

To be honest, I have much better things to do than to do battle with the phone company…two businesses to run, a sports career, friends to keep up with…however I learned to make time for this.

This “project”, was never meant to be so extensive. My goal was to simply publish a website that made a statement, cost Verizon a few bucks and then leave it at that. So what happened? What happened was that I began to ask questions. Why did I receive such poor service? Why wasn’t there an alternative provider for the services I needed? Why are there so many individuals like myself asking the same questions and no one is doing anything about it?

The more I learned the more I realized that this is a serious problem. Much more serious than most people could imagine. Although we like to focus on the extreme cases, I quickly discovered that every time that you or I or anyone pays their phone bill to a Bell, they are being victimized.

Sure I could blow it off. I could blow it off the same way consumer advocates could have blown off ensuring safety standards in the workplace, or in the way that certain persons could have ignored asbestos being used in buildings or in the way that people could blow off pursuing the HMOs that give kickbacks to physicians for not performing critical tests. It would certainly be much easier that way.

However, if not for those other individuals that took the time to protect all of our collective rights throughout history, this country and it’s populace would be a lot worse off. Is it too much to ask that I do the same when encountered with injustice?