My parents had them for long distance from like 1976 to 1999. I cancelled it in 1999 when my sister had made a bunch of overseas phone calls that went through at like $2.50 a minute... because apparently, my dad had signed up for a long distance plan in 1976 and despite paying $6 a month or whatever for thsi plan... when modern plans came out... they didn't upgrade to the modern plan.
So I called a few times and the AT&T people were saying things like... yeah, well, if you were on our current plan, it would only be 50 cents a minute... but you're not. the current plan was something like $5 a month.
So anyways. For some reason I cancelled long distance with AT&T... And switched to verizon or some other company.
About 4 years ago, my Mom starts getting AT&T long distance charges (monthly fees) on her verizon telephone bill, in addition to the monthly long distance charges from verizon.
So I call up AT&T multiple times and tell them, right. We haven't have AT&T long distance in 7 years... What the hell is wrong with you? And they start swearing up and down that we're at&t customers and they sent us a letter X months ago and since we didn't respond, that meant they could bill us. So we go back and forth over various phone calls where it comes down to me accusing them of switching the long distance and whoever I'm talking to is getting progressively more & more nasty at AT&T (multiple people).
So I give up and call verizon and do the... Right, we don't have at&T long distance. And the verizon people are like, "oh yes ma'am, I see you've been a verizon long distance customer since 2001" and I say "yes... so why are you letting at&t charge us for long distance... it's clearly on the bill that you guys are charging us and I never authorized at&t... so it takes a few calls and verizon manages to stop at&t from billing us further... but we've still got 3-4 months of at&t monthly charges still on the bill.
And I go back to at&t where they're still nasty.
So whatever. It's 4 years later and I still haven't paid those stupid at&t monthly charges.
And I'd already wasted several hours of my life bickering with them... so I stopped bothering.
Of course... verizon fios bills are now like that, random charges that I can't get taken off.