What if Judge Green had never lived?

Full disclosure: The telephone company paid for nearly everything I ever ate, wore or owned for the first 20 years of my life. My dad put in 40 years with Pacific Tel, and my first real job was with The Phone Company back when there was only one. Counting three years in the Army, for which I got credit, I did more than a decade as a Phone Man.
People loved to hate The Phone Company in those days, in much the way they hate Microsoft today. I'll tell you what, though: Stuff worked. Phones lasted a lifetime. If something went wrong, which it hardly ever did, they'd come fix it free. When you needed a booth (this was long before cell phones), the things were ubiquitous, clean and operational. Sort of like Starbucks, come to think of it, only cheaper.
That didn't happen by accident. Platoons of people were employed to check, clean, test and repair coin phones. My dad supervised them on a regional level for awhile, and he took a personal interest. More times than I can count, I saw him phone his office, give the location of a booth he'd spotted that didn't meet standards and direct that somebody get to it today. And somebody did.
Then came Judge Harold Green, the jurist who broke up AT&T. Judge Green's decision ended a perceived monopoly, opened the telephone industry to competition, broke down the last thing in America that worked and led, eventually, to my doing without a phone until Tuesday.
"Moisture in the wires," surmised the telephone person to whom I reported No Dial Tone on Saturday morning. That would have been my guess, too: The wires bake in the hot sun all summer, the wind blows, the insulation cracks, it rains. Like magic, you have a ground in the circuit. No calls can go in or out.
Might this be something a phone company could anticipate and perhaps prevent? Well, yes. As is so often the case now that government isn't watching out for consumers, though, I suspect profit takes precedence over service.
High-quality equipment costs money, and preventive maintenance costs more. Over the short haul, roughly the career span of the people making decisions, it's often cheaper for a business to go lowest bidder and hope than to do the job well. By the time things start to go wrong, you'll be safely retired, or at least bumped up the ladder of blame. You see it everywhere.
In the old days of which I speak, there probably would have been a repairman in my neighborhood right now, climbing poles to track down the problem while it's still a problem. Post-Judge Green, though (and post- a lot of other stuff; it isn't all his fault), I'm told I can expect a service call maybe Tuesday, by which time I figure there's a 50-50 chance the wires will have dried out, the phone will be working and the leak will be impossible to find until the next time we have a storm, when the phone company will be busy and won't be able to get a guy out until Tuesday.
There's nothing wrong with a nice, efficient monopoly, you know, as long as somebody's authorized to crack the whip.