you miss the point macfreak.. before vrs,itrs came along, hearing even the deafies have a mental state of the 800's number is for business. and they still do. having a real personal number is better as it resolves a few things. Where are you "normally" calling from/to. 911 address issues. and force a standard to implement that if you move, you really should be having the local area numbers to identify you in the region so caller id can be traced on reverse lookups and such.
the 800 numbers is great for hearing who KNOW you and want to make a long distance call and can save money. god knows we need every way can save in today's economy. we only need ONE 800 number for that purpose. why pass out more then 2 for each deaf/hoh? its ridiculous! business or other reason you come up with is fine for more then 1 800's numbers if you have a want/need for it.
But I bet if you did a inventory of each deaf/hoh person and find ALL the vrs's numbers assigned to them, they would have more then 5 for sure.
unfortunately, today, we are STILL experimenting with ideas and technologies of VRS, iTRS, TRS, etc..and still coming out with more relay companies and ideas so at this point its somewhat a necessity until we come up with a SAE/ISO standard for relay numbers to reduce relay numbers and make it easy to switch between services and companies with a couple numbers, kinda like a purple number accounts. Right not account numbers with same address book and features not implementable across different VRS's and TRS's and companies except for phone number transfers.
