It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

Have you heard this sentence lately? “Please listen carefully, our menu has changed.” I bet you have. It seems like every place you call, from a giant multinational company to a local small business, has a phone system that for some mysterious reason has to constantly be updated. Why exactly does the menu have to change? What was wrong with the last time I called when I had to press 1 for sales and 2 for tech support? If it seems like even making a simple phone call has gotten complicated these days, well, actually, the commercial phone business has never been simple. Back in 1980, here in Baton Rouge, Mark Toney started up a phone business, for other businesses. He called it Preferred Telephone Systems. He was supplying phones that, in those days, you couldn’t even buy. Believe it or not, you had to lease a telephone – even for your home – from the – count them - one phone company, Southwestern Bell. We’ve moved on from those monopoly days to a very different world of business phones. Today we require a phon